Playstation's New Interface?

Credits: www.shacknews.com


EyeToy: The Next PlayStation Interface?
11/25/2003

Sony has big plans for the next generation of its EyeToy technology, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe head Phil Harrison explained in a recent interview with the Australian Financial Review. While the motion-sensing digital camera peripheral is good only for wiping virtual windows as yet, its descendant may power a new hands-free interface for the next PlayStation console.
Harrison, who oversaw the project that created EyeToy, explains the simple camera peripheral as "a signpost for things in the future. If you can attach very high-resolution, low-cost video cameras [to computers] you can deduce some quite interesting things about their users," he said.

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"We'll be able to extrapolate eye movement and gestural recognition, more complicated finger movement, and the logical next step of that is to deduce from a person's facial expression and demeanour what their emotion state is. If somebody is watching [a show] and starts to slump back and lose the will to live, [the computer] might suggest some other forms of entertainment, something a bit more active."

The concept, Harrison said, is similar to what movie-goers saw last year in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise manipulated the computers of the near future with complicated hand gestures. Game designers could implement interface features with partial or complete support for hands-free commands from players, expanding their available control options far beyond the limited number of buttons and sticks offered by current control devices.

Interpreting the complex data offered by players' movements will require considerable computing power, but Sony's next game console is expected to offer that in abundance.