Sony Patents Video Game Robot
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Saturday, 21 of March , 2009 at 2:16 am
Sony may be trying to mix things up a little bit in the video game world by introducing a robot that would like to play a game with you. A physical robot, that is… A video game accessory, of sorts. Details are pretty scarce, but the patent (there’s not even a concept yet) does include a camera, a microphone, some kind of object detection, and a display. And in the picture from the patent, it’s got little wheely looking things.
We’ll have to see how Sony envisions the robot working with the game system… The problem might be that the user would have to split attention between the robot and the game, or if not, then you’ve got a potentially expensive peripheral sitting around most of the time.
As Kotaku points out, Nintendo already tried this kind of thing back in 1985 with a robot peripheral called R.O.B… More, after the jump.
Looking at it objectively, R.O.B. is a pretty lame robot. It only worked with two games (two awful games, from what I’ve read), and was limited to two axes of movement. While R.O.B.’s head stayed fixed toward the screen (receiving optical commands), his torso could pivot and his arms could move up and down to interact in an extremely limited way with an extremely limited set of accessories that were related to what was going on in the game in an extremely tenuous manner. And it was really damn slow. But apparently, the reason that Nintendo introduced R.O.B. was to make something cool to renew faith in video games after the 1983 crash. See? Robots ARE cool! Even sucky ones!
[ Siliconera ] VIA [ Kotaku ]
Comments (2)
Category: Toys
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Comment by nintendo video games
Made Monday, 27 of April , 2009 at 3:07 am
it was a good post…i like it!
Comment by Pikmintaro
Made Thursday, 9 of July , 2009 at 6:21 pm
W00t ROB! he is a character in Super Smash Bros Brawl if you didn’t know but he can shoot lasers out of his eyes in it rofl