Sony software engineer Anton Mikhailov has revealed that Sony had already researched motion camera controllers before Microsoft, but then shifted all resources to focus on Move after it they concluded that it provided a superior gaming experience.
"We felt the cost of the camera outweighed the advantages of what it offered," he explained. "When you make the games what [we] found was while it was more robust it didn't fundamentally enable new kinds of games. The games themselves still played like EyeToy games."
"So you lose these subtle and quick controls. You get a magical experience... You can move and something happens. But you lose that sense of connectedness to the game. You get a ton of latency."
The engineer who participated in creating Move then noted that the 3D cameras which Sony considered and which Microsoft ended up using in Kinect are inadequate with a poor resolution of 320x240 and a refresh rate of 30 fps.
"So when you're talking about tracking fingers, or even tracking things like the rotations of your hand, you're working with 10x10 pixels. It's very hard to get anything useful out of it."
He also noted that - based on the prices he saw while working on similar prototypes - Kinect's selling price is much higher than it really cost Microsoft.