Game Developer News – PS Vita Magnet

With the Game Developer’s Conference being over, we now get more videos rolling into the internet. Eyes on the PlayStation Vita! Last year, the R&D staff from Sony brought a T-Rex to life within the audience (I wrote about it), but this year was even more fun. They had a session to talk about their PS Vita technology and the Augmented Reality capabilities of the handheld gaming device. Luckily someone (or everyone) was filming the talk and uploaded parts to youtube. (Pointers came from Antonio, thanks!)

So, what does the PS VITA technology called Magnet, do? Basically, it’s a 3D feature tracking technology, that is able to determine your position without the annoying markers or symbol cards, you know from other AR demos (sorry, no hurt feelings: like the Nintendo 3DS).

The tech demos below show off the technology pretty self-explanatory. There is no game to see here, just augmented cubes inside a kitchen, but nevertheless a great step towards more AR to come to mobile devices.

Furthermore they show a cool on-the-fly real-time generation of surface textures, that can be manipulated (a table gets geometrically warped). This all combined with knowledge over your real world space can really make cool AR gaming experiences! That’s why it’s so interesting to see the tech geeks show it already. Because with two big players like Sony and Nintendo working on this topic, we can sure expect more awesome demos to follow! They just know how to make immersive games and stories! :-)

The technology itself has been developed earlier (metaio uses a similar twist for their AugmentedCity) and was shown at ISMAR 2007 by Georg Klein, calling it the PTAM algorithm (“Parallel Tracking and Mapping”). If you are interested in taking a closer look at the technological background, you could either check out the 2011 interview with Georg or check out his blog, directing you to all free download pieces to try it out yourself! I’m just curious on how Sony is going to solve the initialization problem: if you have no marker with a known size, your system won’t easily be able to judge about the scale of your tracked world (e.g. is it a scale world or real 1:1?)…

… otherwise, forget that tech talk and just enjoy the videos below and dream of awesome AR games to come!