After going hands-on with the PlayStation Move at GDC, we here at GameXplain came away fairly impressed with Sony's new device. You can read our impressions here. Not too surprisingly, despite Sony's best efforts, it still seems like there is a lot of misinformation currently floating around regarding the technical specifications of the soon-to-be-released motion controller.

We recently contacted Anton Mikhailov, a Software Engineer at Sony’s Research and Development, to see if he could shed some light on the more technical aspects of the controller and help illuminate just how it matches up against Nintendo's Wii MotionPlus.

GameXplain: It was really great to meet you at this past GDC. I know everyone here in the office was really impressed with the Move. We’re all huge fans of motion controls (no matter what most game journalists say), so it was really cool to play with motion controllers that seemed to do everything that we had wanted out of this newest trend in game design.

Anton: Thanks for the great feedback. I'm glad I was able to turn you around. PlayStation Move, the Wii+, and Natal are all different and complex technologies. From a marketing perspective, we try to simplify the technology for the average user.

Yeah, I can see how the message might get a little confused when splitting it between marketing people and tech people. You’ve probably been through this a bunch, but can you talk briefly about the technology powering the Move? I know the Wii Remote (with MotionPlus) uses MEMS technology, what about the Move controller? I had read an interview saying that the Wand uses integrated circuits instead…

Our controller also uses MEMS technology. MEMS is a fancy term for a machine built into an integrated circuit.  The reason MEMS has all this hype is because it is much smaller and less expensive than how this used to be done.  

Ok, well that should resolve that issue, at least. I had also heard some discussion that since the EyeToy is only 120 Hz and the Wiimote camera is 12 MHz, that PlayStation Move might not be best suited for picking up the quick motions that you might see in a game like Red Steel, for example.

Cameras aren’t the only things that allow us to do fast motion. The accelerometers and gyros are very important for this as well. Our sensors actually run faster than the camera so that in the event it does miss a motion they can compensate. Since this happens quickly there are no drift issues that you see when you use accelerometers and gyros only.

On the Dualshock 3, the motion tracking was up to about 300 degrees per second while on Move, it’s around 2500. It’s really hard to move faster than that without hurting yourself.

There are also some advancements in our tech. Not all MEMS tech is made the same. They're just chips, and ours have quite a bit of improvement. This means that we can track fast motions as well as slow ones. It’s actually not easy to do both at the same time.

I think at this point, it’d be worth it to go into some of the differences between the Move and it’s most primary competitor, the Wiimote. For the sake of this discussion, when I refer to the Wiimote, I am including Wii MotionPlus as if it were a built-in part of the device.

Really, PlayStation Move and the Wii Remote are fundamentally different devices. The Wii Remote is a relative device, meaning it can tell how far you're going, but not where you end up. This might be a bit confusing because people think “how can I know where I’m going but not where I am?”. Well imagine that you had to walk next door, but with your eyes closed. You might fumble around and roughly know where you’re going but wouldn’t have any clue where you are exactly. The PlayStation Eye is like our eyes -- it lets us really know where we are not just which way we’re headed. With Move, we use the camera for absolute position, and the sensors for absolute angle.

Holding the Move controller in my hand, it certainly felt like the device was much more accurate in its tracking of my motions than the Wiimote had been.

Anton: Exactly. What this boils down to qualitatively is that when you’re using Move, you feel like your motions are "tighter" to what you really did. This is because the game has to do less magic to guess what you're doing because it pretty much always knows exactly. The simplest way to sum this up is that PlayStation Move is what is known in academia as a 6DOF tracker. This means that it tracks 6 "degrees of freedom" 'absolutely' (3 position -XYZ, 3 angle).  The Wii is an "inertial tracker," which means it tracks position relatively.

Is there anything that you’d like to say to any of the people out there who are wary of the Move so far?

It’s our duty as developers to create awesome experiences that showcase how powerful our system is. We try to do this with our tech demos, but really people want games, and our game developers are working on that. I'm glad you guys can see the potential because certainly we're going to tap into it.

That’s great to hear. My biggest disappointment with the Wii so far has actually not been the limitations of the technology, but rather the lack of good developer support in terms of substantial software. Sure, Nintendo has been there providing some revolutionary experiences, but outside of the giant from Kyoto, there hasn’t been a lot of really quality software that makes good use of the motion controls (there are obviously several notable exceptions to this).

We're trying to release something that allows developers to create really deep, new experiences. For me that’s the focus, really. Technological facts are important, but what’s critical for consumers is the kind of experience that we can provide that hasn’t been seen before. Here are a few experiences that to me, feel completely unlike anything that’s been seen before until now:

-Augmented reality - Overlaying objects onto video or putting objects directly into your hand.

-3D tracking - lots more possibilities in fighting games, RPGs, etc.

-3D Multi-touch - Two controllers provide a way to manipulate 3D objects in 3D space. I think that’s pretty neat. This is kind of a step up from the "Minority Report" interface.

As soon as I tried the painting demo, I immediately thought of the potential for something that relies heavily on user-created content like LittleBigPlanet.

For sure, PlayStation Move has the capability to take user-generated content to the next level. Additionally, there are a few other unique applications for the controller:

3D camera control - Imagine controlling a camera coupled directly onto the device, like a virtual camcorder. You can explore environments, inspect objects, fly around, etc. Couple it with another controller, and you have a really interesting interface for an RTS.

Puppeteering - We can puppeteer not only people but animals. We have a snake demo in which you can control the head of a snake in 3D. It feels really good because you have both position and rotation, like it’s dangling on the end of your controller. We made it into a snake fighting demo that can use one or two controllers.

That’s all really cool. Thanks for taking the time to talk to GameXplain about your product. We all pretty excited to see what else you have in store for us at E3.

There are lots more items but I'd rather save some for showing later. I hope that people can think a bit about it and imagine all the possibilities once you have a truly tracked device. Anything you can imagine doing with your hands, you have here. PlayStation Move is about enabling totally different and immersive experiences.

Awesome. Thanks again, Anton. I think this should really help inform people about what the Move will offer in just a few short months.