Then he turned the controller into a vacuum, sucking up the bots, the orange and other toys into the DualShock. With an upward swipe of the tablet's touchscreen, he flicked the orange - now a rudimentary, textured 3D model - onto the floor for the bots to play with. In a drawing program, he quickly drew a mandarin orange. Waving at them with our hands cause them to wave back.ĭoucet then pulled out a Sony tablet with the PlayStation App installed. Shifting the view back to the two of us on the couch, Doucet then used upward swipes of the touchpad to fling those dozens of robots onto the floor in front of us. A rhythmic tapping of the controller's face buttons inspired the robots to dance. Pressing on its touchpad caused a bright light to shine down, capturing the attention of the bots within. When Doucet covered the lightbar of the controller with his hand, the lighting inside the DualShock 4 dimmed. The virtual interior of the gamepad showed a plastic casing teeming with happy robots. The PlayRoom then shifted the image onscreen from an image of the couch to - zooming in through the DualShock 4's lightbar - inside the controller itself. Tilting the controller from side-to-side, the DualShock rumbled in manner than made it felt like those robots were sliding from one side to the other, with the busy sound of mini-robots milling about pouring forth from the gamepad's speaker. In another demo, Doucet explained that A5081 had stuffed dozens of tiny robots inside the DualShock 4 controller itself. When he did the same, A5081's expression turned sad, thinking we'd disappeared. 'Put your hands over your face,' Doucet instructed, asking me to peek through my fingers at the TV. We tickled and swatted at the robot, angering it to the point where it set my hair on fire onscreen. Doucet then summoned a floating robotic orb named A5081 - or asobi, 'to play' in Japanese - which floated around our heads, then scanned in my face. He started with an introduction to the character A5081, a floating robotic orb.ĭoucet and I sat on a couch, a scene reflected on the television in front of us courtesy of the PlayStation 4's camera. Nicolas Doucet, a producer at Sony Computer Entertainment who works in Sony Japan Studio's internal development department, walked me through some of The PlayRoom 's demos at E3.

The camera, when paired with the DualShock 4's lightbar and the gamepad's motion sensing tech, is capable of some amazing tricks.Ĭreated by a team of 10, The PlayRoom is not planned as a retail product at this point, but it's a promising peek at new control schemes that could come to PS4. After playing with Sony's The PlayRoom at E3, what is essentially a collection of slick tech demos and mini-games, I wish the PlayStation 4 had included the PlayStation Camera in the box.

The playroom ps4 camera