Tag Archives: Playstation

VR / HMD / Game launches in Perth

Virtual Reality, , , , , , , , ,

On Thursday the new Perth chapter of the Australian Virtual Reality Network (AVRN: http://avrn.net.au/) met and were going to do demos of the HTC Vive.
They Skyped with the Sydney chapter who apparently have 80-100 attend the monthly meetings.
The Sydney speaker (leader of StartVR) showed his project and he and another developer ranked the VIVE their favorite, the Samsung Gear best of the phone-based VR (and I did not realize it comes bundled with the Samsung S7 phone, the phone acting as a form of external graphics processor to the display) and the Rift now showing its age and Google Cardboard (really just cardboard box around an android or iOS phone) good as $5 marketing/corporate handouts. They are most interested in the upcoming Playstation 4 HMD, as it works with existing Playstations (not the older version I assume) and hence will have a large ready market.

I instead then left this rather corporate group for the other meeting, a game developer launch -LEVEL ONE [http://www.levelone.org.au/[ at 167 Fitzgerald St Perth, a more indie game incubator/studio/community that has some connection to Film TV Interactive and the State Library.
A local game company had a music interface game in the VIVE which I played with and I quite liked the setup, good resolution, head tracking and very light responsive controllers I thought.
I did not ask how easy it is to develop for and am quite interested.

PS4 camera appears to work with Mac OS X

3D and game editors, tracking, Virtual Reality, , , , , , , , ,

As an alternative to Kinect One (which requires Windows 8) the PS4 eye camera has some interesting features/functions although it is lower res and does not have an Infra Red (IR) blaster..
And can cost $85 AUD or cheaper online or via JB hifi…

How does it compare to Microsoft’s Kinect One camera?
Review in 2013:http://au.ign.com/blogs/finalverdict/2013/11/02/xbox-one-vs-playstation-4-kinect-20-vs-playstation-4-camera
Review in 2014: http://www.techradar.com/au/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-vs-xbox-720-which-is-better-1127315/5#articleContent
A not so positive review: http://www.techradar.com/au/reviews/gaming/gaming-accessories/playstation-4-camera-1202008/review

One possible future use for PS4 eye camera, the VR Project Morpheus: http://www.techradar.com/au/reviews/gaming/project-morpheus-1235379/review

http://www.psdevwiki.com/ps4/PlayStation_4_Camera

Available functions

  • photo, video
  • voice commands (available as well with an earset with microphone)
  • depth calculation/imaging
  • pad, move, face, head and hand recognition/tracking
  • one of the cameras can be used for generating the video image, with the other used for motion tracking.

http://www.psdevwiki.com/ps4/Talk:PlayStation_4_Camera

Features (Could be used for eye tracking..)

  • automatic black level calibration (ABLC) support 2×2 binning
  • programmable controls for frame rate, mirror and flip, standard serial SCCB interface cropping and windowing
  • image quality controls: lens correction and defective pixel canceling two-lane MIPI/LVDS serial output interface
  • embedded 256 bits one-time programmable (OTP)
  • memory for part identification, etc.
  • supports output formats: 8/10/12-bit RAW RGB on-chip phase lock loop (PLL)(MIPI/LVDS)
  • supports horizontal and vertical sub-sampling programmable I/O drive capability
  • supports images sizes: 1280×800, 640×400, and 320×200
  • built-in 1.5V regulator for core
  • support alternate frame HDR / line HDR
  • fast mode switching

What can you do with it?
http://ps4eye.tumblr.com/
“Bigboss (@psxdev) has successfully streamed video data from the PS4 camera to OS X!”
Picture at https://twitter.com/psxdev/status/439787015606136833

Drivers for PS4
http://bigboss-eyetoy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/ps4eyecam-released.html
Links to https://github.com/bigboss-ps3dev/PS4EYECam/
“It is the first public driver for PlayStation 4 Camera licensed under gpl.”

Historical
PS3Eye for Mac: http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/

motion controller/sensors on game consoles

design, game, , , , , ,

I am very interested in xbox kinect, playstation move and nintendo wii (or wiimote plus) reviews, especially to see if and how they can be modded..here is an early review http://www.cnet.com.au/xbox-360-kinect-vs-playstation-move-vs-nintendo-wii-remote-plus-339307363.htm?feed=rss
here is a youtube video of using xbox move as a form of 3D scanner http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/index.html
an article on the above at http://hackaday.com/2010/11/15/rendering-a-3d-environment-from-kinect-video/

nb (wiki) From a design standpoint, Ars Technica‘s review expressed concern that the core feature of Kinect, its lack of controller, would hamper development of games beyond those that have either stationary players, or control the player’s movement automatically; remarking that the similarity of the genres of the launch titles owed to the hardware not being able to “handle much else”, they predicted that Microsoft would eventually need to release a “Move-like” controller in order to overcome this limitation.[76]

Unreal Development Kit

design, game, , ,

Chris Blundell at www.plutonicdesign.com told me he is highly impressed by the free editor and that it creates better game levels than found in the game!

But.. still only for PC..I do wonder how much it costs for a game to go commercial though when sold as an educational game by an educational institute-hundreds of thousands? Or do they take a percentage of the profits (which seems a more desirable option!)

It seems to me that a free game editor is one great leap for indie and educational games (i.e. Unity, XNA-kind of, UDK) but there also needs to be a cheap path to Playstation 3 or XBox..any such pathway out there? Perhaps Blender can be ported to Playstation or XBox?