September 24, 2009, 7:58 AM — Sony has announced that its PS3 motion controller, which it first showed at E3 last June, will ship in Spring 2010. Pricing is still unknown.
The version of the device shown at the Tokyo Game Show this week (presumably the final design) looks fairly similar to the prototype used at E3. It's roughly cylindrical with a set of buttons at one end (thumb operated, I would guess) and a sphere at the tip. Inside the device are accelerometers and gyroscopes while from the outside the sphere will be tracked by a special version of the Playstation Eye camera. The controller has a "rumble" feature and the sphere can change color to give the player another level of feedback.
At launch, 13 games will support the Sony motion controller (Sony has yet to provide an official name for this gizmo); some will be new and others, such as LittleBigPlanet, will be patched to support it.
Sony will be the second major console to add a motion controller. The Nintendo Wii of course uses motion control as its defining feature, and Microsoft has Project Natal, a full body, camera-based system, on the way. The Sony system seems like it'll occupy the middle ground of the motion controller eco-system. The Wii's controls are fairly coarse, while Natal has no tactile feedback system (there's no controller to hold). Sony's device, assuming it works as advertised, should provide both precision and good feedback experience (buttons to press, rumble and the colored sphere) needed for 'traditional' video gaming. (Natal, on the other hand, seems like it'll bring a whole new style of gaming to the Xbox 360.)
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