Sony's PlayStation Move motion-controller is certainly catching plenty of attention lately, but just how accurate is the system in action? Sony themselves are claiming "under 1 frame" lag from the hardware, but when combined with a game (that may be tweaked to smooth out jerky user-input), a flatscreen display and the console itself, real-world performance has the potential to be pretty different. Eurogamer took along a 60fps-capable camcorder to shoot some footage of Move in action, and then ran their stopwatch over the results.
The concept is straightforward. Firstly, running an app that's not console-intensive - such as a simple augmented reality demo, which basically just shows what the PlayStation Eye camera sees - pretty much takes the PS3's own lag out of the equation. Then, you measure how long it takes the on-screen representation to start moving after you go from stationary to suddenly active; similarly, you can measure how long what's on-screen takes to go from moving to stationary.
Doing that, Eurogamer reckon the PlayStation Move latency to be around 133ms, give or take a frame, though that doesn't take into account any lag in the display panel itself. That's probably fine for regular gaming, but may present reaction issues when you're playing titles that depend on outright speed of response. Sony have already limited the amount of simultaneous controller use - to below what the PS3 can actually handle in terms of concurrent Bluetooth connections - seemingly as an at-least partial sop to bandwidth considerations, so it'll be interesting to see how intensive games hold up (and how Sony's ongoing code-tweaking might improve things). Check out the video here.