Traditionally, gaming has been about player control agility. Gaming control has evolved over the years from the antiquated joystick to the novel Nintendo Wii remote, which uses accelerometers to capture player controls. The next step for gaming control is inevitable – full-body control with no wearable or hand-held items. Such natural interaction enables complete player immersion in the game – thus providing an unparalleled degree of freedom and creating a new gaming control paradigm.

Full-body-based gaming is based on a gaming console with a three-dimensional view of the playing grounds. While traditionally such a 3D view has been computationally expensive and therefore prohibitive to the consumer market, PrimeSense is now offering a consumer mass-market depth sensor that can provide full-body motion capturing on a significantly lower-resource host.

An interesting point of comparison between a depth-based gaming experience and a remote control based gaming experience is illustrated by a simple comparison to the Wii. The Wii remote includes two accelerometers, which can provide an accurate relational 3D location of two points along the Wii remote axis. In contrast, the PrimeSensor provides a VGA-sized depth image (640x480 pixels), where each pixel in the depth map is an independent 3D location. Comparing the two control paradigms, the PrimeSensor provides 307,200 points in space, whereas the Wii remote provides only two. The unbounded emerging gaming experience is straightforward from here.

A comparison of gaming control technologies is illustrated in the following figure. Until recently, games were controlled using a standard remote unit, which has existed for many years. The Wii introduced an accelerometer-based technology that enabled hand motion tracking. Today, PrimeSense’s low-cost depth acquisition technology enables full-body motion tracking.