Sony shows off Cell chip with Eye Toy-like demo

[Ren.182]

The power of the Cell processor was demonstrated with a “digital mirror” at the CEATEC 2005 conference held in Japan.

The booth of joint Cell developers, Sony, Toshiba and IBM featured a real-time “digital mirror” simulator powered by the cell processor. A model was seated in front of the simulator that was then able to display a 3D model of the person that matched the movements and facial expressions (!) of the person in real-time.
Cell chip demonstration

In order to create a 3D model of the face of the person sitting in front of the camera, the processor first mapped 500 coordinates. Details such as hair and makeup were then superimposed onto the 3D model. To keep up with changing facial expressions and positioning, all 500 coordinates were read 100 times per second. Different hair, makeup and tattoos were applied to the model in realtime.

This looks really awesome, all done in real-time. Just wow...
Watch the video, its amazing!

http://www.ps3focus.com/archives/131

 

[Absinthe]

That's actually pretty cool. Sadly, I don't see any relevance in regards to gaming.

Funnily enough, the thing that grabbed my attention the most was that Sony is still sticking with that godawful controller.

 

[Ren.182]

It would be cool if they could intergrate a model of you into a game though... Imagine running around online in Counter-Strike: Source in a model of yourself. That'd be funky.

It's a nice little tech demo though

 

[MiccyNarc]

That's sweet.

 

[Shamrock]

It would be cool if they could intergrate a model of you into a game though... Imagine running around online in Counter-Strike: Source in a model of yourself. That'd be funky.

It's a nice little tech demo though

They are working on that I think. I remember you could upload a picture of yourself to some place and they would put you in the game.. I think the game was Tony Hawk.

Anyway, I bet with the Eye-Toy you will be able to put yourself in the game. Sooner than you think.

I hope it works for the X360, too..

I am glad I am getting both.

 

[Qonfused]

Funnily enough, the thing that grabbed my attention the most was that Sony is still sticking with that godawful controller.

Actually, it's very comfortable. A 3rd-party company made a controller like the PS3 controller for the PS1. Very, very comfortable.

 

[Absinthe]

I think I know what you're talking about and I have to say that I do not share your sentiments.

 

[Venmoch]

It would be cool if they could intergrate a model of you into a game though... Imagine running around online in Counter-Strike: Source in a model of yourself. That'd be funky.

It's a nice little tech demo though

Hate to be a spoil-sport but that has already been done already (Well nearly)

Perfect Dark (The N64 one) once had the ability to take a picture taken by the Game Boy Camera and superimpose it over one of the bodies in the game.

The feature was eventully for a reason I cann ot remember but I think it may have been to do with "moral" implications as well as hardware difficulties.

But as far as the Cell demonstration goes.

Big whoop, how does this affect games in any way. In fact why have we yet to really see a games based demonstration in real time using the cell. With some sort of "groundbreaking" tech.

 

[Absinthe]

What Venmoch said, but also...

Cell can digitally mimic you. At what cost? How useful is such a feature if I can't play a game with it? You can't expect me to believe that this isn't taking up a massive chunk (if not all) of its power.

 

[Warbie]

Spoil sports. I would be very happy just being able to stick the faces of my friends and family on game characters

It'd be great for beat-em-ups - Virtua Fighter 5, you vs your granny XD - or when making a player in PES etc.

I'd hate to think how many hours you could lose tinkering with this.

 

[pvtbones]

I'm still on the fence, but one thing I noticed in that video is you could tell what hair style would look good on you in advance so you don't end up going to the barber and getting something you hate, or it could be used in MMO's instead of taking a predefined character with some customization your can take a picture of yourself (apply a matching bone structure for animations) and then customize yourself.

neat? yes replacing the controller? not for a while (especially in online games)

 

[destrukt]

With the demonstration of the Cell processor, Sony has gone one better: This time, when you throw the controller, the Cell chip can track the controller in-flight and tell you where it’s landed. Neato!

good foresight for when people try to use their controllers as boomerangs and lose them, way to go sony !

 

[Naudian]

Everyone hates sony

 

[destrukt]

at least the jokes about sony have some basis, instead of random bashing like the microsoft-hating-kids do

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Hate to be a spoil-sport but that has already been done already (Well nearly)

Perfect Dark (The N64 one) once had the ability to take a picture taken by the Game Boy Camera and superimpose it over one of the bodies in the game.

An old 16-bit game called Corporation allowed you to send in a photo of yourself to be put on one of the game characters. Not exactly high-tech, I know...

 

[Absinthe]

at least the jokes about sony have some basis, instead of random bashing like the microsoft-hating-kids do

lol M$ sux!1!!

Did you notice how I wittily replaced the "S" with a dollar symbol?

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

You're just so.....edgy!

 

[clarky003]

I have to say if I where standing in the middle of a room with one console at one end and the other at the other end, I would slowly start edging towards the Xbox.

Simply because no matter how fanciful the techdemo stuff the 'cell' can produce .. Im not encouraged to buy it for that reason, some people are ('Omg teh GraphiX' people), Im more concerned with the practical gaming aspect.

I hate microsoft yes for many reason's, but they've outclassed sony when it comes to design and are most definately aware that 'uber techdemo shit' just dissapoints people in the end, because you do get a large fan base of noobs who think that they'll beable to play games that look like that, its a hype thing... like valve at their first E3 showing off Hl2, except worse.

 

[destrukt]

lol M$ sux!1!!

Did you notice how I wittily replaced the "S" with a dollar symbol?

i'm very impressed, classy touch absinthe !

 

[Ren.182]

Hate to be a spoil-sport but that has already been done already (Well nearly)

Perfect Dark (The N64 one) once had the ability to take a picture taken by the Game Boy Camera and superimpose it over one of the bodies in the game.

The feature was eventully for a reason I cann ot remember but I think it may have been to do with "moral" implications as well as hardware difficulties.

Yeah, i remember seeing that in a magazine ages ago and thought, wow, thats the best...

Now we have this

But what i meant was a model of you, not your skin applied to a model. Would be cool, but, obviously, if you're a fat guy you're going to have a little disadvantage in games like CSS

 

[VictimOfScience]

Guys, you all have to try to remember that the PS3 isn't the entire reason this processor was developed (IBM and Toshiba wouldn't settle for that alone). It is capable of and has a lot more potential than the aforementioned tech demos. See the following:

The fundamental task of a processor is to manage the flow of data through its computational units. However in the past two decades, each successive generation of processors for personal computers has added more transistors dedicated to increasing the performance of spaghetti-like integer code. For example, it is well known that typical integer codes are branchy and that branch mispredict penalties are expensive; in an effort to minimize the impact of branch instructions, transistors were used to develop highly accurate branch predictors. Aside from branch predictors, sophisticated cache hierarchies with large tag arrays and predictive cache prefetch units attempt to hide the complexity of data movement from the software, and further increase the performance of single threaded applications. The pursuit of single threaded performance can be observed in recent years in the proposal of extraordinarily deeply pipelined processors designed primarily to increase the performance of single threaded applications, at the cost of higher power consumption and larger transistor budgets.

The fundamental idea of the CELL processor project is to reverse this trend and give up the pursuit of single threaded performance, in favor of allocating additional hardware resources to perform parallel computations. That is, minimal resources are devoted toward the execution of single threaded workloads, so that multiple DSP-like processing elements can be added to perform more parallelizable multimedia-type computations. In the examination of the first implementation of the CELL processor, the theme of the shift in focus from the pursuit of single threaded integer performance to the pursuit of multiply threaded, easily parallelizable multimedia-type performance is repeated throughout.

source
or

According to Petrov Group, IBM’s “GHz U-turn,” away from frequency and toward System-on-Chip integration and memory density, will have profound consequences for all major players in the digital entertainment, enterprise computing, and semiconductor industry sectors. It could lead to mass extinctions and the emergence of new vendors and businesses; it will profoundly change the landscapes of entire industries and create new configurations of business innovation, productivity, and added value. The changes are imminent although still poorly, if at all, understood.

“This year the era of entirely new organic-like computing technology is starting. It will be based on software-enabled computing cells. These building blocks will be highly integrated and super-dense, have very low power, and will be cost-effectively produced in ultra-large volumes. Perhaps most importantly, it will be software, rather than hardware, that will fuel the computing performance of the new systems,” Mr. Petrov said.

source

So as you can see, the Cell has its work cut out for it, but the possibilities are pretty amazing:

The need for more realistic physics environments and AI in games is no illusion; the question is will Intel’s forthcoming dual and multi-core CPUs (with further optimized SIMD units) offer enough parallelism and performance for game developers, or will the PPU bring Cell-like architecture to the desktop PC well ahead of schedule? The answer to that question could very well shape the future of desktop PCs even more so than the advent of the GPU.

source

This thread is pretty old news though--I remember seeing a couple of videos of this a while back. Still very cool though and with a lot more potential than for just gaming....

 

[A True Canadian]

Cool video.

Is it possible that this technology may revolutionize the way developers deal with motion-capture and animations for gaming? Intriguing thought.

 

[DigiQ8]

is that the same E3 demo ?