It seems facial recognition is all the rage these days. At his Develop Conference keynote today, Kish Hirani, the Head of developer services at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, revealed that the PSeye camera has similar capabilities to Microsoft's Natal technology: it can recognise the player, detecting facial features and even calculating elements such as gender and age. Apparently, Sony has already created a range of libraries for developers who wish to implement the technology.
Hirani also spoke about the PS3 motion controller, due to launch next spring, which uses a combination of camera tracking and built-in accelerometers to ensure seamless, lag-free movement detection even when you have it behind your back. Interesting stuff - although the timing of the facial recognition unveiling, so soon after Microsoft's arguably triumphant E3 showing is somewhat suspect.
Anyway, while I was at Develop yesterday, the most intriguing possibilities for this whole technological sector were mentioned to me by Andrew Oliver of Blitz Games.
He's been heavily involved with the company's revolutionary stereoscopic 3D graphics engine for the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles. He was saying that a key problem with 3D at the moment is that the technology fools you into thinking you're seeing a three dimensional object, but when you try to look walk around the image to see it from a different angle you can't, because of course, it's really sitting on a 2D screen.
However, with motion tracking camera technology like Natal and now, perhaps, the PSEye, the game will be able to trace the player's movement and alter the onscreen image accordingly. In effect, you'll have objects that you can wander around and seemingly view at different angles. Apologies if this is all old hat to you true 3D experts - it's a possibility I'd not considered before.
And I know the Olivers - they wouldn't tell me that if they weren't already working on it.
