Behind the scenes of Playstation Eye

Posted on May 1st, 2007 by PS3Vault

Eye Toy 3

Via Newsweek,

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.

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