| stephen700 said: The toshiba spurrs engine is a cut down CELL with 4 SPU's at 1.5Ghz to keep power low for laptop's while the CELL in PS3 is 7 SPU's at 3Ghz and the RSX GPU is probably also more powerfull than the GPU in the toshiba laptop too. Yes the PS3 is cheap but the CELL is quite capable of this application with plenty of processing power to spare ( One researcher claims voice recognition of 100's people simultaneously on just one CELL processor!).
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See that is just it, with 4 SPUs and 1 always claimed by the system you are down to 2 SPUs left. At that point there isn't enough power left to handle a full game, but that is moot considering the price of the Toshiba system. I fully appreciate the abilities of this system but its simply no where near a mass market price point.
As for the voice recognition, I want to point out something I've pointed out to many others on this site and is actually quite applicable to the Toshiba technology as well. Hardware usage numbers provided by researchers and developers cannot be extrapolated to mean anything beyond exactly what they say. For all we know they could have the memory bus completely maxed out while only utilizing a single SPU (its not hard) and that would mean even with a billion SPUs all but that one are worthless, so unless you personally have hands on with the system and know detailed system usage info its pretty unreliable to assume anything beyond what is explicitly stated.... which is that the Toshiba solution requires 4 SPUs provided that its the only thing running on the system and you can recognize lots of voices with a single SPU provided its the only thing running on the system. Thats all you can deduce from that, at best its a bare minimum of what they require.
| stephen700 said:
FYI the digital mirror it's far more than a simple 2d coloriser. It does a complete 3D capture/reconstruction of a persons face and renders it as a 3D model, it also allows it to be modified it's complete real time 3D face capture and render system.
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Yeah, I actually read up on it before my last post a little a bit and its a fairly impressive piece of technology, I'm impressed by what they've done although I do think their is room for a lot more and I hope they continue down that path. And I absolutely think that in the future this technology will be the way things go for that reason, but right now it simply is not a viable solution with the current consoles for economic reasons, among others.
| stephen700 said: Software wise the digital mirror /and other research projects may be far from being packaged in a form which would allow developers to use them in games but the hardware in the PS3 is fully capable of supporting it if they wanted to right now. ( PS3 CELL is a popular with researchers who do intensive calculations )
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Again I'm aware that this software can run on the PS3, but running software like this on the system is a long way off from implementing it into a full working game as I've said. Games today are demanding in all aspects of development, there have already been optimisation issues with several PS3 games during development. By the time you task those 4 SPUs to this software the dev team will be trying to decide if they should cut their physics engine or their AI.
| stephen700 said: Why dont we see this in games then ?? good question - my answer >>> Games developers do not seem to take advantage of new research like this. Voice recognition for example is rarly if ever used in console games ?? yet many companies use voice recognition /synthesizer systems to answer customer phone calls etc. Games developers are very slow to recognise or take advantage of new software techniques like this even if they are quite possible to do. The most innovative thing i have seen from a game developer lately was UT3 on PS3 allows the use of a mouse. WOW they must have worked overtime to get that feature to work and gave themselves a pat on the back - talk about innovative NOT.
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I absolutely agree that most devs are lazy but they aren't so lazy that they don't like the idea of making money. I think it is more than reasonable to look at this situation and come to the conclusion that devs have never done it because of the enormous hurdle of marketing a gaming peripheral. Selling a peripheral to most gamers has long been considered a suckers game and Nintendo's recent success in that department with the zapper and the balance board in Japan are exceptions that have spurred some interest in whether or not things have changed.
Now I don't think devs are going to do a 180 so fast that they think they might be able to convince folks into buying a $4k head tracking peripheral but I can defeinitely see a few of them trying to implement the technology through use of the Wii-Mote methodology and the Eye. Which is precisely why I think it is somewhat silly to bring up the Toshiba tech in a discussion about head tracking during this generation. Its absolutely a cool tech, but not something we will see this generation on consoles.
| stephen700 said: Regarding using 4 points for tracking on the Wii -actually would need 4 points ON 3 independent planes for full 3D tracking and if any became obscured or mixed up it would loose track so such a helmet would be rather awkward looking and probably need at least 6 or more points. Sorry i gave the impression that Wii head tracking is useless this is not my intention - it's is a usefull idea even with 2 points, it's simple and usable for some things.
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Full 3D tracking of the target is not strictly required, with the lateral and vertical measurements being exact you only need an aproximation of the depth. The Vertical/Lateral is easy enough considering the format the data is provided in, and the distance can be aproximated more than satisfactorily with a rough estimate of the average width of a person's face being used as the assumed distance between the points. This is precisely what is seen in this video, as many of the folks on this site have seen. As I pointed out in my last post you aren't likely to turn your head so truthfully I don't think it will be an issue for any of these methods.
I will say that I do agree the technology is simple, and that is why it is an ideal solution for this generation.
| stephen700 said: However what ps3 eye could do for gaming on the PS3 is far more interesting and far greater posibilities than what an IR point tracker can do.
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| stephen700 said: Thumbstick controllers are a very poor way to interact with a computer game IMHO and game developers are very slow to innovate. I am all for better ways to interact with computers like face recognition, voice recognition , head traking , motion sensing controllers , etc It's pretty sad when games developers are so backwards they would rather the player remember various buttons to have their character say something when they could instead do Voice recogniton on machines like the PS3 , Xbox360 and mabey even the Wii. |
You will get no arguments here, I think there are quite a few things that could be done that aren't and there is no doubt that developers are fearful of the unknown but its worth noting this is because this is an industry where a large investment in a game that flops can have catastrophic repercussions for that developer.
Final Word:
I realise that you like this Toshiba system, and I admit I do as well. But it has several issues preventing it from being a product for this generation, among those reasons are the following: The software is not available for licensing due to it not being developed as a modular engine and it will need work before it can be licensed, even if it were turned into an engine that a developer could license it is simply eats too many system resources to be viable as a gaming application in its current incarnation on any console, its pricetag is far from something consumers will even consider, even at a reasonable price people will expect a healthy supply of games to utilize with the peripheral (this is one of the major downfalls of peripherals BTW) which will require a sizeable push on their part to get developers to license their engine and that of course goes back to their fear of new things, etc...In short, the Toshiba solution is dead in the water this generation.
Both the Eye is and Wii-Mote would be served a kindness to be considered even neutered versions of the Toshiba technology. And as I've said already, the biggest reason the Wii-Mote methodology is the best available right now is because not only is it simple, but its extremely affordable and has multiple uses for every Wii-Owner and not just Wii-Owners who plan on playing a card-game or have $4k lying about. Affordability and multiple uses are a huge plus for any peripheral.
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