Thursday, 08 March 2012 14:52
Sony shows its PS Vita Magnet augmented reality
Written by Slobodan Simic
Works fine without cards
The Verge managed to score a neat video hands-on with Sony's PS Vita "Magnet" augmented reality tech at Game Developers Conference 2012. While everyone was thinking how Nintendo is the one to look at for handheld console AR, it looks like Sony is coming back to it and it looks quite impressive.
Sony didn't talk a lot about PS Vita and augmented reality and everything we saw until know looked far from impressive. Luckily, it looks like Sony is working hard on it and Magnet certainly has a lot of potential. Unlike other AR techs, Sony's Magnet doesn't need cards or any other thing to detect a surface, other than enough contrast on it and some time to scan it.
The first demo is not that much impressive as it just places AR objects on the real-world surface that you previously scanned. The second demo, on the other hand, allows that same scanned surface to be modified and interacted with, which comes a lot closer to the things seen on Nintendo's 3DS handheld, but of course, on much better screen.
Unfortunately, there are no details regarding the actual games that will use Magnet tech, but Sony representative on the video told TheVerge.com that is should ship soon to developers so we are keeping our fingers crossed.
You can check out the video and more info here.
Slobodan Simic
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view itLatest from Slobodan Simic