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LAS VEGAS--Imagine playing baseball on Nintendo's Wii Sports and being able to pull the ball to left field or lay down a bunt instead of just randomly smacking doubles or home runs.
A Silicon Valley company says its take on motion-control technology will offer far more accuracy to such games. CNET got the first look at the technology here at CES 2009.
Sixense Entertainment, based in Los Gatos, Calif., makes the technology called TrueMotion, which was first developed to track the head positioning of F-16 and F-18 jet pilots. It consists of a handset and a base station. The controller tracks movement along six different axes, and the base station generates a very weak magnetic field. The data is used to determine the exact position of the cursor on the screen.
Nintendo's Wiimote, by contrast, uses three axes and measures the acceleration of the handset, not the absolute position of the remote. Using the absolute position allows people playing motion-control games, such as baseball, bowling, or soccer, to "use real world skills," said Sixense CTO and Chief Architect Jeff Bellinghausen. As in, if you know how to play baseball, TrueMotion lets you make strategic plays, like hitting a bloop single to left or a double to right.
