Sony expects true interaction, AI, and holographs in ten years

Sony's vision of gaming's future includes "perfect" virtual characters indistinguishable from real people.

"I think what people want in games in ten years is the perfect human being in digital form, where you can't tell the difference if it's real or digital," Sony's Shuhei Yoshida, head of Worldwide Studios, told Eurogamer duirng a panel. "In your reality it's a human.

"In the future, in 10 years, I like to think developers will have access to information of the player in real-time, and will be able to create some almost dangerous activities," he continued.

Mick Hocking, Sony's head of 3D, agreed that virtual character improvement would be a focus over the next decade, and highlighted improvements in AI and technology as key to success.

"In 10 years, are we going to be able to interact with characters in the games? Will we have AI that allows us to truly interact with a character, talk to a character, show the character objects and it can recognise them?" he asked.

"Perhaps you're playing a detective game and you're playing a witness," Hocking suggested. "The game has got to decide whether you're lying, rather than you deciding whether the character's lying in the game, because we can look at your expression on your face. That kind of stuff would be really exciting - bringing the player in as an actor themselves."

Hocking said holographic projection is "definitely feasible" within a decade, too.

"We can produce a pseudo-holographic effect now by head tracking the player with a Sony 3DTV and EyeToy. You bring something out of the screen and you can look around it, which is quite a different experience to just having standard 3D.

"We're right at the start of doing the R&D on this, so, we're really looking to our game designers taking these types of technologies and working out what they can do to enhance the actual gameplay."

[image - digital composite singer Aimi Eguchi]