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Something I always feel the need to correct here is that frequent recalibration isn't needed, frequent recentering is. Recalibration involves keeping the controller still for few seconds, and is needed when the controller is noticably drifting at a steady rate; when you put the controller down, you'll see the camera or pointer steadily move for a second or two, then suddenly stop. Recentering is what happens when your press ZR in this game with pointer controls or Y in Splatoon and Skyward Sword HD. I need to recenter frequently in both titles, sometimes multiple times a minute when playing Skyward Sword HD. But I can go hours without needing to recalibrate.I'm going to come out and say it: Gyro aiming is still a step back from the IR aiming we had on Wii.
Gyro requires calibration or it becomes prone to drifting. It also, as implemented in most shooters on Switch, has no neutral position. What that means is if you want to move the crosshair right, you move your wrist right and then have to leave it there: moving your wrist left back to neutral means moving the crosshair left. away from the target you just aimed towards.
With IR aiming on the Wii, at least, most developers used floating crosshairs that allowed you to move the cursor left or right to move the screen, then move your wrist back to neutral to keep your gun aiming forwards towards your target.
Metroid Prime Remastered does emulate this at least with the free aiming similar to Trilogy and MP3, but the gyro being prone to drifting is still going to be an issue unless you frequently recalibrate.
Hopefuilly we someday get a joycon that has the IR sensor pointing the other way and that can use something like the Dock to get a constant point of reference.
I don't disagree with your overall point, I just think it's important to keep the terminology straight. As for your last point, I wonder if image processing has gotten advanced enough for Nintendo to bake camera reference points into the HUD of games. It's not IR and likely couldn't be used as a realtime pointer source, but could theoretically be used in conjunction with a gyro as an anchor point, similar to Wii Sports Resort and the original Skyward Sword's implementations. My own work with machine vision would lead me to believe this could work, though I'm not sure how you'd implement that in a Bluetooth controller.
Only with dual stick controls, which leaves you with the X swap for beam selection compromise. But you can turn gyro on with dual stick.As someone who refuses to play Splatoon without gyro aiming, and desires gyro aiming in every shooter possible, I was super disappointed in the implementation in Prime, unless there is a way to remove having to hold the pointer to the side of the screen and make it more like mouse movement anyways, if there is, well I might have a replay on the way then.