Sony introduced their Move motion controller last year to a fair amount of buzz. While the device arguably had a better launch slate than Kinect, with more than 8 million Kinect sensors sold since its November launch, there’s no question that Microsoft’s revolutionary peripheral trounced the Move at retail. But the device’s chief architect wants to unlock the untapped potential of the innovative wand by going open-source.
Speaking with Ars Technica, Dr. Richard Marks said:
“For a long time I’ve mentioned in my talks that we’d like to let more people innovate with Move. It’s a nice tool. It is made for the PS3, so it’s difficult in that sense for us to let it happen,” he told Ars. “I would really like to see it happen, so all the really creative minds in the labs and the hobbyists can actually play around with it. But as of now, we haven’t announced anything official. But it is something I really want to see happen as soon as possible.”
A lot of the attention that Kinect’s garnered has been on the strength of alternative uses that programming enthusiasts have put it to. If Sony sanctioned the release of drivers and dev software for the Move, it’d be an abrupt shift for a company that currently in the throes of a legal battle against hackers who’ve opened up the PS3’s software protections. Marks’ remarks make it seem like But, even if Sony made the full suite of Move programming tools available for the curious, it’d earn the company a lot of good will. It might even generate independent development of some promising games.