Sony patent motion control using any object
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Picture the scene. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 has just come out, and you stroll up to your PlayStation Eye with your favourite coffee mug in your hand. A few seconds later, that mug has become your 3-wood and you’re using it to drive a ball 300 yards down the 1st at St. Andrews.
Now, thanks to a patent application from Sony, that could happen. As well as the recently demonstrated ‘motion wand’, Sony have now registered an idea that will see any object become a game controller.
The patent tells us of the plan to have any object ‘mapped’ by the system so that it can be used as a controller.
In the illustration below, you can see a man holding what can only be described as M.C. Escher’s toilet u-bend, but the idea is that this could be any real-world device. A plate. A baseball bat. A golf club. A hamster*.
"Do you like my goatee?"
Gamers will simply need to show various angles of the object to a capturing system – most likely the PlayStation Eye – and once the data has been gathered the object can be used within any supporting title.
In this next diagram you can see some examples of the kind of objects Sony has in mind. Shame they didn’t go with the hamster for the patent application though.
"Is that a light-sabre in your hand, or are you just pleased to see me?"
It will be interesting to see where Sony takes this technology, and we await the birth of the first SonyDamage.com website and the inaugural law suit when the aforementioned hamster becomes one with the 40 inch HDTV.
*The value of your hamster may go down as well as up. Make sure you read all the terms and conditions. If you do not keep up your repayments, your hamster may be repossessed. Oh, and don’t use a hamster as a gaming device – ok?
[Source: Siliconera]
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Interesting..so if we had a real [insert game related item here] we could use it in-game instead of it drawing us one? Or would it still superimpose the image of a sword over our own real life sword, as an example? Guess we’ll have to wait to find out..
If your going to be swinging a real life sword about in your living room, just make sure, kids, animals, and significant others are well out the way first!
My kids like when I swing them around. This might allow to me to game and spend time with them.
Haha Lol!
I see this as a preventative measure against Microsoft. Project Natal will have restrictions due to the limited interactivity of a controller-free environment. It is entirely plausible that MS had planned to integrate some sort of motion detection of regular objects – which may not happen now after this patent.
Just my cynical 2 cents.