Sony's Marks: Move Supports 'Wide Enough Range Of Experiences' For Success

Dr. Richard Marks, senior researcher for Sony Computer Entertainment’s R&D department, has been talking about Sony's Move motion control device versus Microsoft's Kinect, suggesting that Move's controller/camera combo is 'flexible' compared to the "set of experiences" the body-capture based Kinect offers. When asked in the new issue of Edge magazine whether he agreed with Microsoft’s position that ‘one controller is too many’, Marks replied: “I don’t think that point of view is quite right… I think you can do some things really well with just a camera, but there are a bunch of experiences you could never do as well.“ Marks, who conceived and developed Sony’s EyeToy hardware and was later involved in the development of its PS3 successor, PlayStation Eye, is one of the people responsible for designing and bringing the Move hardware to life. He continued: “I think our system is really flexible because we still have a camera -- we could still do all the stuff EyeToy did and more – but we also have this more high-fidelity controller which you can hold in your hand and is tracked really accurately, and you have the buttons.” Marks, who studied avionics at MIT, went on to receive PhD from Stanford, working in underwater robotics, before joining the PlayStation R&D department where he worked on EyeToy and its successors, said of Sony’s rival: “I think whether Microsoft succeeds or not really depends on whether or not people think that buying Kinect for that set of experiences makes sense." “With Move we wanted to make sure that we had a wide enough range of experiences that is worked as a platform device for us. So we could really say that, no matter who you are, you’ll really want this controller, even if you’ve never played a game, or you’ve been playing the hardest core games of all.”