Sony Demonstrates PlayView at CEDEC 2010

When PlayView was trademarked by Sony shortly before E3 2010, speculation ran wild with many assuming it was either new hardware or a PlayTV like peripheral. Neither of these are the case. PlayView is infact a new service for the PlayStation 3 console and was recently demonstrated by Sony at the 2010 CESA Developers Conference in Japan.

True to its name, PlayView is a “high-quality image enhancement technology”. The aim here is to be able to quickly scale an image with more than 1 billion pixels with absolutely no delay.

At this year’s CEDEC 2010, Teiji Yutaka demonstrated PlayView using the PlayStation Move controller in real time to increase and reduce the size of a still image of a park consisting of over 3 billion pixels. You can view the transition of the images in the demonstration below (click each image for full size)

You can clearly see what this does for still images, and it’s said to work with movies and music as well, but how does this translate into use for gaming? Well, a few options were mentioned. Sony plans to use PlayView for “electronic documents” such as game manuals and guides. One such example was given to have tiny videos embedded into these manuals and guides, that users could zoom in to view and then back out to view the rest of the document. Another option was in the games themselves. An example given would be a menu screen filled with levels, and users could zoom in and out to select the level. We can imagine this technology working in other ways, such as examining a crime scene for the most minute of details, or searching through a massive puzzle for the piece you’re after.

Though PlayView might not have the most practical of uses, any new technology that can open up new, unique avenues to provide content or new experiences, is always welcome.

Here is a video of it in action:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LIdPOZGoDE&feature=player_embedded#![/youtube]

What are your thoughts on PlayView?

[Image credit: Tech-On!]

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