John-ShepardAugmented reality is coming to the Nintendo 3DS, the new handheld unit that launches on March 27. If you aren't familiar with AR:
It goes like this- you take a real-life card that is placed on a flat surface, and then you aim the portable device's camera at that card. The AR card will then start a game that appears to be happening right in front of your eyes, "altering the surface and requiring the player to physically move the 3DS to center on targets or various other aspects of gameplay." Nifty, no? Well, thanks to Sony's NGP presentation at this year's Game Developer's Conference, we now know AR is also coming to the NGP . Sony's Next Generation Portable was used to turn a T-Rex poster into a virtual monster on the NGP's screen, thus revealing the new feature for the highly advanced portable.
In addition, the NGP will also boast a feature called "Near," which will tell a player "where they went that day" and will find out which NGP games are most popular in that area. The 3G model will use GPS for this, while the non-3G version will utilize Skyhook, which takes advantage of wireless hotspots. The rest of the presentation sort of rehashed what we already know, but that's to be expected. The comparison to the PlayStation 3 might interest you…click the link above to learn more.
Lets not forget the PSP was the FIRST one to have implemented AR, remember Monster Hunter with the PSP camera? yeah people forgot about that so soon huh? where you go around searching for monsters around the house, yep SONY actually beat Ninty to the punch again and dint get credit…shocker!
Last edited by JMO_INDY on 3/3/2011 10:15:50 PM
Indeed!
Don't forget Invizimals as well.
Yes exactly, and even the PS2 with the EyeToy was a form of AR in its own matter of speaking, I mean you interacted with virtual items through the view of a camera right? same concept yet undermined because it wasn't a Nintendo device.
Every new piece of info makes the NGP more and more enticing. Can you imagine a Fatal Frame type of game using AR? That would be sick.
I like this slow leak of features and info. If I got hit with everything at E3, I wouldn't have been able to wrap my tiny little brain around it.
So how long until someone creates an App that looks at a chick and gives her a 1-10 rating?
Just don't point it at your wife or girlfriend, she might throw the ngp in the garbage and you to the curb. 😉
Uh World, thats asking for trouble…only if you do what Kraygen was speaking of. someone's wife might not be too happy they are only a 6! lmao
I can see some fool tween trying to AR his penis just so he can have his very own virtual play-mate
LMAO!!! That was great!
This sounds very, very like the game Invizimals.
In which case can we also point out that the PSP has augmented reality? It's only fair.
Here's a link.
http://us.playstation.com/games-and-media/games/invizimals-psp.html
I believe you should have special rights to publish whatever comment you want Highlander, no matter what you say it will either be intelligent, cogent, or at least to put someone in their rightful place, i think you should become a Mod or something for the site!
Seconded.
Even on the rare occasion that I disagree with Highlander, his comment is still well presented.
Hmm…to 3G or not to 3G?
depends on price up front and price per month.
I'm wondering if there some deal people will be allowed to work out with their cellphone companies who are already using 3G like me with my iPhone.
Yay, so the ngp is going to do what the already does.
Not really that interested in this feature as I've yet to find any good use for it, but I'm still looking forward to ngp for all its other awesome reasons.
cool!
looked really cool the dinosaur demo.
still not convinced on this though, my GO is doing just nicely and i dont use it very often.
i wonder if your can look at all the NGP's near stats on a PC from home so say for example when its a nice day i can at parts of my area see what they are playing. If they were playing something mp that i owned and liked i'd be tempted to take the NGP ad go outside and play say at a starbucks or pub beer garden or something along those lines.
I wondered what Near was about when I saw it listed on the screenshots for LiveArea.
AR doesn't really interest me unless it's the ARI of Heavy Rain. It'd be cool to be able to recreate a real life room in a game, and perhaps have your avatar as a miniature who has to get from one point to another. That'd be fun.
Peace.
I think it will be interesting to see how the technology and software develops.
For example, Here's a hypothetical constructed from current technology and things Near may be able to do. Let's say you have your NDP/PSP2 and you're using Near, you have GPS enabled. Using the camera in the NGP, Near provids you with a 3D overlay based on google streetview, As you move the handheld around, the view changes with the NGP dynamically stitching and re-rendering the streetview overlay and adding tags to everything in sight, whether it be a restaurant or a gas station or whatever. Using optical character recognition, every street sign or commercial sign in view is automatically read and translated to the language of your choice, and that information is overlain on the view for you. As you walk around with your Near enabled NGP, someone approaches you ad speaks – in a language you don't speak. NGP's microphone captures their speech and in near real time translates it to the language of your choice wither on screen, or in the Bluetooth ear piece you're wearing. So that you can reply to the person, you punch up a translator app on the NGP and enter your reply in your language using the virtual keyboard. The NGP then translates that into the correct language and speaks it to the person for you.
All of the technology to do this exists. The existing PSP has translation applications. Optical character recognition, computer speech, and natural language recognition are all possible now. The dynamic recognition of a spoken language and translation in near real-time is a bit of a stretch, but possible with the right amount of computing power. Even without that, everything else is perfectly possible with a combination of current technology.
I could imagine visiting Japan and being able to use this kind of technology to navigate around the country and communicate with people. I'm reminded of Star Trek's universal translator combined with the ARI system from Heavy Rain and a bit of a tricorder for good measure.
That would be amazing. And the tech to pull it off exists you say. In that case, how long would you estimate before something with such capabilities is on the market? I ask because while it may be able to be created as an app, it'd probably be reserved for a completely stand-alone product. If such a program could be loaded onto the NGP though… Wow.
You could pull together most of the GPS/streetview element from available components today. Overlaying the translated street signs and such would need some OCR capability written into that to read and interpret the signs, and then translate. The translation could be handled by Google's own translation service, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. The NGP has all the sensors needed to determine the devices orientation so the graphics can be generated and manipulated as you move the unit.
Spoken word translation in near real time is still very cutting edge and I'm not even sure it exists outside the lab. However, if you know the language being spoken, there are voice to text applications for most major languages, and once the words have been converted to text, they can be translated to whatever language you like. The resulting text can then be read back by the system over a headset or speaker. The translations would be crude, but as long as everyone speaks clearly and uses simple sentence constructs and good grammar, the technology would work well.
It's like a jigsaw puzzle of technology, really, you're taking components from navigation systems, motion control, optical sensing, optical character recognition, google earth/street view, machine translation from language to language, voice to text, text to voice, etc… No one product brings all of that together, but it all exists today.
Imagine though if the sensors, camera and display were integrated into a pair of glasses. The lenses could be printed with transparent OLED screens (again current technology, just not yet integrated). With a hand held computer of sufficient power and a network to access remote services like google earth, streetview and translation services, you could create a workable Augmented reality system similar to what I described above. If the translation technology could be improved significantly to enable near real time, and reasonably accurate translation of speech in an arbitrary language, you would have the ultimate tourist accessory, and also a device that has been considered science fiction for many yeas now.
While I remember, I believe that the US military uses some translation devices in the field in places like Afghanistan, so elements of the more exotic parts of this do currently exist.
I think that within a decade, we will see something like this occur, and perhaps the decade after that it will become common place. But, that might be my wishful thinking. I just know that all these things are technically possible, even if they do for the moment need more performance than a hand held unit can muster on it's own. Of course supplementing the power through remote servers is always a possibility.
Either way, you have to love technology.
Thanks for the info Highlander. 'Tis remarkable that such a device could theoretically exist today. But that makes me think that even ten years would be a conserative estimate for such a thing to hit the market, even if it isn't yet even approaching an experimental stage of production.
The things that can be done with the future possibilities of technology are truly limitless. Imagine biotech/nanotech enhancements built into the human capable of doing just this. That's still very much science fiction, but steps are being made towards that end. What does the future hold for humanity through technology? Evolutionary control? Our very own attempts at Panspermia? Or will it lead to our ultimate self-destruction?
Peace.
Many evolutionary biologists would argue that we already have altered our evolution. OK, there are a sizable number of people who don't believe in evolution, and I don't want to get started into a huge debate on religion. However, let's put it this way, humans have developed over the last several thousand years. Technology has in fact altered us already, even in the last 500 years significant changes have occurred. Just the impact of medicine, sanitation, and nutrition has lengthend our life-span, we're generally taller, heavier and stronger than our ancestors. We modern humans are more intelligent than our ancient brethren as well. However technology today is also used to augment us. whether it be the influence of the library to extend our education and knowledge, or the impact of the Internet and personal computer increasing the amount of information we have available and can usefully filter and analyze. Technology in one form or another extends our mental faculties. Simple devices like spectacles help our faulty vision, but night vision goggles let us see in the dark – something that we no longer need to evolve to do because we have a tool to do it for us.
In a sense you could argue that by using tools we can effectively stall the development of humans as a species. Medicine means that we don't have to evolve disease resistance because we can treat disease. However in the absence of medicine, could that be seen as weakening the human species? Our technology and tools extend our physical and mental abilities. Without labor saving devices, would/could we be stronger and more dexterous? Without systems, books and technology to hone our mental faculties might we lose some of them? Might our brains configure differently if we no longer have to handle such quantities of data and thought processing?
Technology has positive and negative effects. Who can say where it all leads?
Captain Kirk is standing on deck, where he has just learned of the new Playstation Transponder
"Beam me down Scotty, it seems there's…. intelligent PSP2 life…. down there…. on Earth after all"
And Scotty, you…..transport….down,…and report….back to me if…. there's anything at all….usable on that….360.
Scotty wheels around to confront Captain Kirk and yells "Damn it Kirk, I'm a medical officer, not a f*cking miracle worker"
Last edited by BikerSaint on 3/5/2011 10:30:48 PM
Still not interested. I'll wait until there next release in handheld systems in which they'll have the ngp and psp phone combined together instead of 2 separate machines.
But then again, they might just come out with a 1.5 version or several of them for both the psp phone and ngp.
You have to be prepared to wait a *long* time then, cause I don't see that happen anytime soon. It's largely two different markets. And the phone user don't want to pay extra for some gaming chips he won't use, and the gamer may not need an additional phone.
Last edited by Beamboom on 3/4/2011 9:30:03 AM
I also have to point out that the comment-ors on that site are ridiculously idiotic to a degree I could never re-enact.