PS3 3D camera could rival the Wii-mote

[Steven W]

A new patent by Sony could mean that Eyetoy 3D is on its way to the Playstation 3.

Check out the Headline for more info.

[Lexic]

Looking at the patent diagrams it appears as though a controller will be used to capture an image on the camera which will then be projected in 3D into the game. Sounds familiar..

Yeah, reminds me of their 3D infrared eyetoy demos. They've a few other older patents that try to do similar things with a regular eyetyoy, this looks like another one for the pile. It'd be interesting if they used tech like this with the new eyetoy, but to be honest I'd prefer if it was infrared in the first place, so they could do this better.

edit:

Actually, Sony was demonstrating this technology as far back as 2000. They had a demo which took a wand and translated its 3D motion to a sword on screen using only one camera, just as this patent seems to be describing.

To show off some of the hardware's potential, Dr. Marx put together a demo called the ''medieval chamber.'' He attached a camera to the PlayStation console, and then wrote a program that would translate the movements of a sword in his hand into images on the TV screen. Although it relies on a single camera, the sword on the screen moves in three dimensions.

''We can do that because we know the size of the objects in the screen,'' Dr. Marx said. ''When it leans toward the screen it gets fatter at the top and skinnier at the bottom, and we can calculate that.''

http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technol...52C1A9659C8B63

That article is from 2003, but they originally showed the demo at Siggraph in 2000:

http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex00_08_01b.html