Sony Says PlayStation Move Precise Enough To Play StarCraft

There’s been a flood of information coming from Sony about the new PlayStation Move controller for the PS3, but Sony’s technically inclined folks showed off some of the more technically capable members of GDC, getting down to the finer details.

PlayStation researcher Anton Mikhailov, platform research manager David Coombes and developer support engineer Kirk Bender ran through a handful of demos for GDC attendees, some fun, others a low level technical peek behind the curtain of PlayStation Move. Some of the more interesting things Mikhailov and crew talked about were related to the motion controller’s level of precision.

Mikahilov said the PlayStation Eye is capable of tracking the Move’s movement to a precision of about one millimeter in the X and Y-planes. He showed this onscreen, zoomed down to the pixel level. On the Z-plane, Move’s depth perception level of precision is about a centimeter. He further illustrated the Move’s level of accuracy by mounting the controller on a tripod, eliminating the jitter we were seeing during on simple tech demo, which was actually coming from Mikhailov’s hand.

Some of the Move’s other neat technical tricks came in the form of combining face tracking with glowing orb tracking, the ability to detect facial features like glasses and a very rough estimate of a user’s age. The most potentially interesting uses of Move’s capabilities came in some very smooth, very accurate looking painting programs, the kind of thing that would be great for a graffiti themed video game.

But putting the Move controller’s level of precision in terms most of the room could understand, Mikhailov said that they’ve been able to use the PlayStation 3 add-on as a device to control the PC version of StarCraft. While the company already has Move support working in the equally precision demanding SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs, if it works well as a mouse replacement, it might be worth picking one up.