Folks over at Games Industy have spotted a recently published Sony Interactive Entertainment patent that aims to allow players to use inexpensive things as controllers. In its illustrations and explanation, the company used bananas and oranges as examples.
“It would be desirable if a user could use an inexpensive, simple and non-electronic device as a video game peripheral,” the application reads. “The present disclosure seeks to address or at least alleviate some of the above-identified problems.” Sony’s technology would use any “non-luminous passive object being held by a user” as a controller. Two of the illustrations accompanying the banana example depict dual banana controllers and an augmented reality banana controller.
So how does it all work? Well, a camera would scan the item in a player’s hands and track its colors, shape, contour, etc. Video games could be programmed to recognize various objects as controllers or they could have advance configurations for certain items to be used as controllers, and let players know what they can use.
Sony wrote:
For example, it may be known in advance that a user intends to use a banana or orange as a video games controller (e.g. by having selected an option such as ‘add a banana for player 2 to join’), and so the object detector may be configured to segment out colors not corresponding to yellow or orange from the obtained images. The object detector may be configured to generate a binary mask of each obtained image, following the filtering of any colors known not to correspond to the object being held by the user. The contour detection may then be performed on the binary mask generated for each image.
What do our readers think?
[Source: USPTO via Games Industry]
