Sony Demonstrates PS2 Video Conferencing

Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its article discussing Sony 's demonstration of a PlayStation 2 using a USB webcam to run a video-conference across the Internet, as showcased at the IPv6 Business Summit 2004 in Japan earlier this week. GI.biz points out that, although this conference was "about the IPv6 [Internet] protocol", according to their sources, "Sony has been encouraging developers to use the EyeToy webcam peripheral to add video communications to their online PS2 games - over the plain old IPv4 Internet - and it's expected that the first games to use the functionality could arrive before the end of the year." The article concludes that this move "would give Sony a technological lead over Microsoft", but is also "likely to raise a number of contentious issues - such as the possibility for abuse of the service."

Comments

Re:Bandwidth Issue

[AIX-Hood]

Whatcha talkin' about Willis? Xbox live already does this exceedingly well over even substandard broadband connections. VoIP for these things generally only uses 1.4kbytes/second for each user, and that gets muxed together into a single stream to cut down on bandwidth waste. Video on the other hand uses far more unless they're using mpeg-4 or better compression which would probably be hard on the PS2's relative slow cpu.