Move creator dismisses brainwave controls

With motion controllers now commonplace, many have speculated that being able to play games using only the power of thought is the next boundary for developers to break down. Indeed, a few primitive prototypes are already out there.

However, according to the man responsible for creating the PlayStation Move peripheral, this sort of space-age tech is not something that Sony is currently interested in chasing.

"That's where it always ends up because the final end everyone thinks of, the ultimate end is the brain experience," said Sony R&D's special project manager Dr. Richard Marks when asked by Gamasutra what the next technological paradigm shift for the industry might be.

"But I think the brain interface thing is too far. Actually I think the body should stay connected. Like having your, you know, adrenaline pumping.

"When you play some of the experiences like Rock Band where you break into a sweat playing the drums, those things are good. I like those things. I don't want to remove all of that.

"Some people just say, 'If I could just get rid of all those human body problems...' I don't agree with that. I like it when it's connected. So I'd rather get more information about what they're doing. A lot of expression comes through what you do with your hands and your body, so."

Elsewhere in the interview, Marks also delivered his verdict on Microsoft's competing Kinect system. He explained how he was a big fan of camera control in general but only for "a fairly narrow set of experiences".

"It's really good for dancing. There's no way you could argue that. It's great for dancing," he argued.

"But it's not so good for maybe first person shooters or an RTS. Those kinds of things just don't really make as much sense for that by itself. So I think that it's a good tool, again, but it doesn't solve all the problems of video games by any stretch."

Marks added that he was impressed by how well Kinect had integrated voice recognition but insisted the technology still had a long way to go.

"I think that actually [Kinect] does better in that area than I expected it to do. I tried Kinect on the voice networks, it's better than I expected. But it's tough, it's still very stiff. You have to speak the way it wants you to speak. And you have to kind of modify yourself to match it. You watch Star Trek and they just talk to the computers whenever they want, as if it's just another person.

"We're still quite a ways away from it knowing whether you're talking to it or to another person in the room. And not having to really treat it so stiffly, I guess. I think that's not quite there yet. But I think it's good, I think it's a good vector. There's a lot of powerful information that can come out of voice."