Razer and Sixense are partnering to bring gamers the ultimate motion tracking technology that provides superior control to bring a whole new user experience.

In the past three decades companies have attempted to use a variety of technologies in order to produce affordable and reliable motion control solutions. The most serious contenders have been ultrasonic, optical, and inertial. All have fallen short due to inherent technical limitations. (see Table 1: Contrasting the different types of 3D controllers)

Inertial systems have recently made major breakthroughs thanks to the latest accelerometer and gyro sensor technologies. They've done a great job of introducing the concept of 3D game control to consumers around the world in gaming, but nothing has fundamentally changed because the same limitations remain. Controllers that rely on inertial thrust to infer user intent cannot determine where the controller is located; they can trigger animations but little more.


The magnetic motion sensing technology used by Razer computes exactly where the controller is located and how it's oriented at all times, down to the a millimeter in position and a degree in orientation. It then reports these values with no shadowing and no drift. In gaming that's the difference between guiding a character and actually being that character.

The Left 4 Dead 2 demo shown at CES (see video) is the tip of the iceberg for the hardware's potential in gaming. In an FPS players will be able to throw grenades in any direction, effortlessly lobbing them onto rooftops and through windows. The controllers will be used in racing games as highly responsive steering wheels; in track editors, reaching directly into the game environment to snap track pieces together; or in flight simulators with one controller serving as a flight stick and the other as a throttle. Players will experience fluid 1-to-1 interaction in RTS games; zooming, rotating, giving unit commands, and generally monitoring the state of the field of play effortlessly and intuitively.