There’s no way Kinect can do lightsabers, says one of the chief architects behind the PlayStation Move, unless Microsoft starts busting out sticks.
Move engineer Anton Mikhailov thinks that the Force is most definitely not with Kinect. Based on an E3 trailer showing a tiny snippet of a motion controlled Star Wars game on the 360, he’s convinced there’s nothing that Kinect could do with a lightsaber that Move couldn’t do better.
Mikhailov said that Kinect wouldn’t be able to track a player’s hands and wrists accurately enough to make a lightsaber game really work. The best way around this, he said, was to give the sensor an actual object to track, like a stick. He didn’t think that Microsoft would actually do that though, as it rather put a damper on its claims that you didn’t need anything else to play a Kinect game other than your own limbs. He didn’t know if Sony had a Star Wars game lined up for Move, but that if it did, it would be “damn better than Kinect could ever do.”
If there’s anyone – bar Microsoft employees – who have a really good idea of what Kinect is and isn’t capable of, it’s Mikhailov. One of things that he helped investigate for Sony before it settled on its glowing ball on a stick was a 3D camera similar to the tech that Kinect uses.
He’s likely correct that Move would be the best fit for a lightsaber combat game, but it doesn’t automatically follow that the Kinect game will be bad. He’s bound to be a little biased towards Move, he helped invent it after all, but even so, for him to dismiss the game based on so little information is ridiculous. I think Master Yoda summed up Mikhailov’s screed best when he said, “Much anger there is in him. Too much pride in his powers.”
Source: Eurogamer
