What's on the horizon

[frosty]

Sure the tech inside these systems has been discussed and beaten to death for years now, but let's look beyond the box for a bit.

What about these other devices, such as eyetoy 3 and sony's mysterious "gloves". What sort of technical requirements do they have? Could you run them with any game, or would their CPU demands be too much to handle gaming with either of these units on some of the most technically demanding PS3 titles out there? Could we see a Lair or Killzone with support for these devices?

[makeitlookreal]

Frosty,

It would be nice if some of these devices could contain built in processing ability. That way less processing power from the CELL would have to be tapped.

[LiquidEagle]

I really hope to see plenty of PSEye support, but rather than see a brand-new peripheral announced now (PSEye satisfies me for awhile), I'd like to see a revamped controller that includes rumble. We'll probably end up seeing that at E3 (hopefully), but the sooner the better.

[section]

PSEye seems interesting, hopefully they are able to widen the scope a bit from what we are used to, entertainment wise. In some cases even eyetoy wasnt a toy but now the possibilities are becoming huge because of the embedded ear.

[TheGreenElf]

Frosty,

It would be nice if some of these devices could contain built in processing ability. That way less processing power from the CELL would have to be tapped.

I can't see that being very practical or very cheap to be honest. I'm interested in the gloves however, as they seem to be something I read about recently in a science/tech mag and now I want to see these.

[Sephiroth_VII]

Wounding, EY3 needs to be affordable to become popular, so including a small CPU is out of the question.

[LiquidEagle]

it was MILR who talked about that, not wounding

And don't all of these peripherals have processors in them? They just aren't very powerful, right?

[frosty]

yeah. my main question is how much of cell will they tax? will we still see games that we consider pushing the envelope of ps3's power that can utilize this tech, or will it have to be watered down to handle it?

[cpiasminc]

What about these other devices, such as eyetoy 3 and sony's mysterious "gloves". What sort of technical requirements do they have? Could you run them with any game, or would their CPU demands be too much to handle gaming with either of these units on some of the most technically demanding PS3 titles out there? Could we see a Lair or Killzone with support for these devices?

The CPU demands for things like Eyetoy games or glove-peripheral things is not massive, but putting them in the context of a Lair or Killzone where the processor time is used about as heavily as they can do with that codebase may not have the time to spare. Well, being able to spare 1 SPE for PS3Eye is probably plenty to work with for most games.

In general, peripherals like the Eye and the glove are probably going to be part of trend towards putting less pre-processing on the peripheral and relying more on the CPU to fill in the gap. The PS3 Eye, for instance, doesn't do a lot of the things on its own that the PS2 Eyetoy did (and that's deliberate), and instead you have to demosaic, and interpolate on the CPU. Similarly the filtering capabilities of the mic are completely done in software. For a console peripheral, that's fine since the goal is to make them cheaper.

The real difficulty with these types of peripherals isn't so much power, but the fact that resolving the information in a useful way is really really tricky stuff. The kinds of things that really get into balancing the fidgety (and noisy) nature of the input and trimming that out, but also fighting the precision demands of the game you're working on. Failure to get to this point is what creates input schema like that of Red Steel.