Nuclear Muffin said:
With motionplus, the wiimote can tell the difference since it can just sense whether or not the remote's rotational orientation matches the tilt of the camera (and if it's not the same, then it just interprets it as a change in pitch/y translation)
I think it's probably a bit trickier than that...like when you have for example simultaneous changes to position and orientation, working out accurately how much of the change in the image of the sensor bar to attribute to translation vs rotation may be tricky. I think there's room for imprecision and ambiguity that over time, if you put imprecision on top of imprecision, could result in pretty off numbers.
Not to mention, of course, if you go outside the wiimote's field of view, you're effectively back to square one if trying to use it as a ground truth or beacon.
I've seen some people doing hacks though with the sensor bar to try and overcome some of this, rearranging the leds in different patterns that make it possible to use the sensor even alone to figure out rotation and position independently. Though still of course, you have to keep the sensor bar in the camera's view.
Nuclear Muffin said:
I agree, height sensing is definitely a good thing
Well, my comment there was about the ability to motion capture over prolonged periods thanks to absolute positioning, without resets. Knowing the height of the thing or whatever isn't a big deal outside of AR apps or whatnot, no, but it's the role of absolute position data in facilitating accurate motion tracking beyond a couple of seconds that's more significant.
Nuclear Muffin said:
No it won't, without absolute pointing capabilities it's gonna be much slower and much more awkward to control than Wii FPS games.
It's 'pointing capability' will depend on the quality of the gyroscope. Working out the xy position should be fine and dandy, but if orientation depends solely on the gyros, then the quality of that aspect of its pointing will depend on the quality of the gyro.
One thing it does have over the wiimote in terms of pointing apps, is independent knowledge of rotation and translation. For apps that might benefit from that (e.g. drawing). It's why they made such a big deal over it at e3.