The Playroom

Sony didn’t intend to release The Playroom. The absolutely incredible augmented reality showcase – which we recently got to check out firsthand – was designed as a collaborative effort between the platform holder’s hardware and software teams in order to better understand the new control possibilities of the PlayStation 4. However, an overwhelmingly positive response to the demo at E3 prompted the company to change its mind.

“It follows the DNA of [the PlayStation Vita's] Welcome Park,” senior producer Tsubasa Inaba told Polygon earlier in the week. “That's actually the perfect example. Our research and development teams for hardware and our software teams worked to put that application together. It was a very similar situation for this one.”

With the simple showcase proving such a success, the firm is planning to expand upon the idea. The current demo includes several minigames, including an impressive motion controlled version of Pong. But now the company is aiming to incorporate new experiences from different internal developers, and according to Inaba, these could be added prior to release.

One thing that the producer was less clear on, however, is how The Playroom will actually be distributed. A leaked page on Sony’s website previously hinted that it would be pre-installed on the console, but Inaba was less certain of that. "We hope to have a more definitive answer to that question in the next month or two,” he concluded. That day can’t come soon enough, because we're ready for another round of augmented reality Pong.

[source polygon.com]