Geek Out: The Playstation Eye is Nearly Upon Us. Dr. Richard Marks Takes Us Behind the Scenes of its Birth.
Ever since we first saw back in 1999 or 2000 what would later become the EyeToy, we were intrigued by its possibilities. That interest was further piqued during a subsequent visit to Sony Computer Entertainment America R&D a couple of years later, where Dr. Richard Marks, aka the Father of the EyeToy, demonstrated the possibilities of a future EyeToy with depth perception. Imagine being able to do everything that the Wii remote's gestural controls can do--without requiring the remote--with a healthy dash of "Minority Report" on top, and you'll have an idea of where Playstation would like to go. Nevertheless, one must first take baby steps; these are represented by the EyeToy's no longer toy-like successor: Playstation Eye, which was announced last week. To get the inside dope on the PS3's newest accessory, we conducted an interview with the always-affable Dr. Marks. Here's what he had to say.
What was the philosophy behind the PlayStation Eye? How did you and Sony decide on its feature set?
This is the LONG version....
The basic idea for Playstation Eye was to create a device for interactive gaming and enhanced communication. It was designed specifically to be used with PS3.
We learned a lot of things from our experience with EyeToy. The initial design meeting for what would become Playstation Eye was called by Phil Harrison. It included myself and key designers and engineers from the EyeToy game teams of SCEE [Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.] We sought to address some of the issues of EyeToy, but also add some new capabilities as well, keeping in mind all along the PS3 as the intended platform.
For designing the camera portion, there were many, many, agonizing trade-offs. Resolution vs. light sensitivity vs. framerate vs. dynamic range. There are also field of view and bandwidth and compression issues. To guide us through this, we created several usage scenarios and scored the importance of each design criteria for that scenario. For the final design, the interactive gameplay and communication scenarios were weighted as the most important for PS3.
As I mentioned already, our previous experience with EyeToy was invaluable. Low-light performance was viewed as a key issue. Also, we felt a big factor of EyeToy's success was the responsiveness imparted by its 60 frames per second framerate, so we made that a minimum requirement. The compression block artifacts of EyeToy are visually unappealing, and they also limit some of our algorithms, so we pushed for uncompressed video. And finally, the many game ideas put forth by the designers suggested the need for two different fields of view.
What about the microphone?
For the microphone portion, we knew that to truly make a useful communication device, we needed a very good voice input solution. Also, speech recognition is a technology more and more games are incorporating, and this requires clean voice input. Following the EyeToy tradition, our primary consideration was ease of use; it should just work. My U.S. R&D colleague, Crusoe Mao, had already been working on research for voice input using microphone arrays, so his work was merged into the design. The hands-free voice input this enables may be the single most important feature of Playstation Eye.
But throughout all this, we universally agreed on one underlying design criterion: cost. Just as with EyeToy, we wanted to create an affordable device that could be accessible to all players and gain widespread popularity. We understood this was the key to allowing people to enjoy the many new experiences we were planning to create.
Can you give us some more details on the device's low light operation capabilities?
In the several years since EyeToy was created, camera technology has improved drastically. In particular, the sensitivity of camera sensors to light has greatly improved. However, this has led to a mainstream trend of making smaller and smaller pixels, but more of them, leading to little overall improvement for each pixel.
For Playstation Eye, we worked closely with Omnivision, our sensor chip partner, on a design that is counter to the mainstream trend of smaller pixels. In low-light conditions, this means that each sensor pixel is able to gather more of the available light and produce a better signal.
This simple story might help explain. A while back, late one night I was testing the first prototype camera hardware, and I discovered that just the light given off by my flat-screen monitor was enough to illuminate me well enough for the camera to image me!
When I visited SCEA R&D back in 2002 or 2003, you showed me a demonstration of array microphones. Can you give me some examples of what this will mean for games and communication?
The most important thing this means is that we can get clean voice data into the PS3.It allows the device to effectively "listen" in a certain direction. In our case, we would listen in the direction of the person playing the game. Previously, the only way to get clean voice data was using a headset worn by the player; now, without wearing a headset, players will be able to talk freely. The device is especially good at removing ambient sounds like traffic and wind noises from outside, the whirring of fans, etc. Also, there is special processing to remove the game sounds generated by the PS3 itself.
The clean voice data provided to the PS3 could be used for chat or for speech recognition, or any other use that a game might have. And it easy for the player, since it doesn't involve wearing anything or configuring anything.
The device supports both 640 x 480 resolution at 60 frames per second and 320 x 240 resolution at 120 frames per second. What are the scenarios where people might want to use one versus the other?
We expect 640 x 480, 60 frames per second to be the most common usage. This provides the best video quality, and is quite responsive. Most webcams only go up to 30 frames per second, so this is already twice as fast as the norm (achieving 640 x 480, 60 frames per second, uncompressed, required a tricky bit of engineering).
320 x 240 at 120 frames per second is a more specialized mode intended for high-speed tracking applications. Most TV display modes are limited to 60 frames per second, so the doubled framerate of the video will not be directly visible. But it means the PS3 can get twice as many video frames to process, which translates into being able to track things twice as fast, or to observing an object at twice as many points along the path it travels.
One of the most surprising and welcome aspects of PS3 is how open it is when it comes to formats, ranging from its support of SD Card and CompactFlash to MP3 and AAC. Why then does EyeCreate save files in a proprietary format rather than one that can be easily shared outside of Playstation users? Do you expect to support other formats in the future via upgrades, as with WMA support on PSP and PS3?
Future formats are still being discussed.
When should we expect a price announcement for Playstation Eye?
I don't know exactly when the price announcement for Playstation Eye will be, but please note that the model used for the rough cost design was EyeToy.
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