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PS3 3D camera could rival the Wii-mote

by Steven Williamson on 20 July 2006, 11:40

Tags: PlayStation 3, Sony Computers Entertainment Europe (NYSE:SNE), PS3

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A recent patent by Sony details a new motion capture technology that could rival Wii's innovative controller. The camera will track every movement of an object and project those actions onto screen allowing players to interact with games like never before.

Looking at the patent diagrams it appears as though a controller will be used to capture an image on the camera which will then be projected in 3D into the game. Sounds familiar..

The original Eyetoy has had a mixed reception in the Playstation community with the main complaint being the fact that different games have different tolerances towards light conditions, so there's plenty of fiddling around before it works correctly.Others just can't get enough of it and will no doubt look forward to seeing what Sony can do with their latest gadget.









It may not be long before we're leaping around the house, Sam Fisher style!

Source : Tech On

Picture courtesy of : Gamespot


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Posted by deleted - Thu 20 Jul 2006 12:02
Looking at the patent diagrams it appears as though a controller will be used to capture an image on the camera which will then be projected in 3D into the game. Sounds familiar..

Yeah, reminds me of their 3D infrared eyetoy demos. They've a few other older patents that try to do similar things with a regular eyetyoy, this looks like another one for the pile. It'd be interesting if they used tech like this with the new eyetoy, but to be honest I'd prefer if it was infrared in the first place, so they could do this better.

edit:

Actually, Sony was demonstrating this technology as far back as 2000. They had a demo which took a wand and translated its 3D motion to a sword on screen using only one camera, just as this patent seems to be describing.

To show off some of the hardware's potential, Dr. Marx put together a demo called the ‘'medieval chamber.’' He attached a camera to the PlayStation console, and then wrote a program that would translate the movements of a sword in his hand into images on the TV screen. Although it relies on a single camera, the sword on the screen moves in three dimensions.

''We can do that because we know the size of the objects in the screen,'' Dr. Marx said. ‘'When it leans toward the screen it gets fatter at the top and skinnier at the bottom, and we can calculate that.’'

http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9F0CEFD71738F930A25752C1A9659C8B63

That article is from 2003, but they originally showed the demo at Siggraph in 2000:

http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex00_08_01b.html