Sony brings new 3-D viewing Technology to the PS3
PS3 gets "worlds First" 4K by 2K visual Magazine
PlayView being updated for 4K resolutions, 3D support and in-game browsing.
Last year, Sony unveiled
Playview, a service for the PS3 that makes it possible to view high-resolution images on your display, for example in manuals or guides for games. And yesterday, big S announced in Tokyo that PlayView will be able to produce pictures in 4K×2K (4,096×2,160) resolution, or, in other words, four times the resolution of full HD.
The next version of PlayView, due out next month, will also support 3D in 4Kx2K resolution, which is pretty cool.
At a press conference yesterday, Sony said that their technology will be used to launch in Japan the so-called PLUP SERIES of digital visual magazines, which will be the first in the world to feature 4Kx2K resolution.
GT5 used Playview for their Car Database.
Playview
When PlayView was trademarked by Sony shortly before E3 2010, speculation ran wild with many assuming it was either new hardware or a PlayTV like peripheral. Neither of these are the case. PlayView is infact a new service for the PlayStation 3 console and was recently demonstrated by Sony at the 2010 CESA Developers Conference in Japan.
True to its name, PlayView is a high-quality image enhancement technology. The aim here is to be able to quickly scale an image with more than 1 billion pixels with absolutely no delay.
At this years CEDEC 2010, Teiji Yutaka demonstrated PlayView using the PlayStation Move controller in real time to increase and reduce the size of a still image of a park consisting of over 3 billion pixels.
You can clearly see what this does for still images, and
its said to work with movies and music as well, but how does this translate into use for gaming? Well, a few options were mentioned. Sony plans to use PlayView for electronic documents such as game manuals and guides. One such example was given to have tiny videos embedded into these manuals and guides, that users could zoom in to view and then back out to view the rest of the document. Another option was in the games themselves. An example given would be a menu screen filled with levels, and users could zoom in and out to select the level. We can imagine this technology working in other ways, such as examining a crime scene for the most minute of details, or searching through a massive puzzle for the piece youre after.
How is it done? With technology developed for web browsers, Probably Cairo that was necessary for the PS3 webkit port.) Webkit supports the same technology to be resolution independent. The libraries ported into the PS3 with webkit add functionality.
Edit:
I've been using the term SVG and incorrectly applying it. Cairo is known primarily as a SVG library but it also contains Pixman. The combination of the two allows scale-able (zooming) for vector and pixel based graphics as well as the digital manipulation of pictures and video when bound with gstreamer. This is an important point as this is the primary reason Sony is including it in the PS3 OS.
So now we are seeing a 4K by 2K video standard being supported by the PS3, it's picture support with zooming (3-D coming) at this time (its said to work with movies) but why that standard.....my guess has been that the PS4 will have 4k by 2k media rendering. Sony has been up-converting all their movies to 4K and filming new ones in that standard.
Playview allows lower resolution displays to access higher resolution content, this includes pictures and movies, by supporting zooming. This is similar to how the PS3 displays pictures which can be zoomed into with one joystick with the other allowing travel in the picture.
It is nothing new, the iTablet and iPhone has had a zooming interface as do Android platforms as everything on them uses SVG graphics. In my opinion the PS3 is going to support SVG in the same way, all PS3 routines will be rewritten to use Cairo for rendering as has already been done with all 2011 Sony networked products like TVs and Blu-Ray players. Two things then become possible, Zooming and international Fonts with Cairo-Pango.
The PS3 is the KEY for Sony to introduce 3-D high resolution pictures and Video to consumers as well as how they can display those formats when using Sony cameras.
Edit: at this time I don't think it supports 4K video.
OK, so I just killed part of my argument above in message 554 <grin>.
Playview is also being discussed in NeoGAF @
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=435890
Edit: And it has not been confirmed that Cairo is being used for Playview. I assume it is as it's capable of doing so and is the only SVG library that we know is in the PS3. I say library because my understanding is that OpenGL does the work.
There are multiple chains of logic supporting Sony using Cairo rather than custom code. The biggest is that they will want Playview media usable on multiple platforms and Cairo is a cross platform library usable on any platform with OpenGL and also on Windows and other backends.
Cairo contains Skia code (Android) and all Webkit browsers support a common SVG standard which, using the same logic, Playview probably uses the webkit SVG library which is supported by Cairo in the PS3.
Something similar at a website
http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ It's just SVG and hyperlinking, at this site totally supported in a browser with SVG. So from functionality it appears that Cairo is being used to support Playview in the PS3. Again from Sony, the Playview library can be called and used by a game as well as webkit and webkit support libraries which includes Cairo.
If Playview is using a webkit SVG standard then Playview would use the SVG library supporting webkit on a platform. For Android, the Skia compiled library of openGL calls, for the PS3 and Vita, the Cairo library of compiled openGL calls.
Looking at functionality, Playview also has to know how to display fonts, pictures, Movies and music also 3-D. That requires multiple libraries of considerable size. I would guess it's a certainty that the webkit support libraries, which have to support all the above for webkit, are being used for/by Playview.
1) Sony started work on the GTKwebkit April 2010
2)
Sony applied for a trademark for "Playview" (date on article is June 2010)
3) Showed a working Playview at CEDEC Sept 4, 2010.
4) PS3 Firmware 3.5 released September 28, 2010 contained a webkit javascript engine with bindings to Cairo. (Cairo openGL had to be in the PS3 at that time)
5) GT5 delayed till after PS3 Firmware 3.5 for it's Playview car database.
/xx/ quote:
Now seriously, I know it was a bit of a stretch from my part, and I'll change my previous post to reflect this, but from the convenience standpoint of the
Sony Group, it makes sense.
The
SCEI Software Platform Development Dept., advancement called by them
High-Resolution Image Enlargement Technology (高画質画像拡大技術

consists in tree hierarchies with different and variable in size (down to 256x256 px) image tiles consisting in Scalable Vector Graphic representations, the archive data stores information of each image tile position in regards to what is being visualized on-screen. As
jeff_rigby pointed,
OpenGL back-end compliant
Cairo SVG main branch libraries are incorporated into the
PS3 platform, so it would be a simple step to use them. Of course, this is all speculation based in approximations (functionality), but what is more interesting is the wider picture that some information shows.
Sony Electronics Inc. (SEI) own
Sony Developer Network had a, now undisclosed, initiative called
Sonys Networked Application Platform (
SNAP) as means to impulse a new framework with the objective of development of applications for different devices, namely (and this is important) those devices from the
Networked Products & Services Group and backed by
Sony Network Entertainment Inc. (
SNEI). A section of the now missing website precisely talked about focus on visual approach of the applications:
http://fireballed.org/linked/2010/11/24/snap/
This where it gets interesting, as some of the latest
Sony Electronics Inc., products already use
Pando +
Cairo, in the internationalization with dynamic text (i18n-text) for example (
http://old.nabble.com/Pango-License-td30466635.html), and for future applications also supported by
Sony Network Entertainment Inc., but... where does the
PS3 system falls into all of this? Well,
Sony Computer Entertainment America (
SCEA) recently transferred the management of
all online services, that obviously includes the
PlayStation Network, to
Sony Network Entertainment Inc. (
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...America_Taking_Over_SCEAs_Online_Services.php). That means they are preparing the integration of all their backed products into the same network, and
for a simple integration you need cross-platform applications and services to use in all of them, and that is why the SNAP Developer Program work and Cairo SVG "easier" assimilation for different back-ends and subsequently different products grants them an advantage in porting, generating in a simple way connectivity and synergies. As
Mr. Hirai said, this
"will drive vision, strategy, and execution for network services across the entire Sony group".
As
PlayView for Games its only the first step for said technology, and different contents not exclusively related to a gaming platform, like digital versions of the
PLUP SERIES (プルアップ シリーズ

magazines, are going to be distributed in the future as well, it would be a logical step for them to make it available to the rest of
Sony Network Entertainment Inc., supported devices through the future general
PlayStation Network (or supposedly
Sony Network) and
Store, right?
Edit: Assuming Playview is designed to use webkit tools there must be some way of telling the platform OS how to process the Playview file. Further we don't know how Playview works, is it a file that is javascript or XML based?
In any case Playview probably has an extension that tells the OS how to use it. Does this also require DRM support? Part of PS Suite certification?