![]() ![]() Sony took a relatively conservative approach with Move, giving it resources but not betting the company on its success. And both companies had gone all-in, spending enormous amounts on marketing in an attempt to reach a new audience. ![]() Motion controls had become the industry’s biggest trend. And while Move marked a technological step forward, allowing for more precise 3D control, many saw it as a copycat version of Nintendo’s remote. ![]() In 2006, Nintendo had released its Wii Remote, which quickly became a cultural phenomenon as a motion controller that appealed to an audience that didn’t normally play video games. It looked like a wand with a glowing ball on top, and players could swing it around to control what happened on the screen.Ĭonceptually, it wasn’t a new idea. And one of their biggest projects was a motion controller called PlayStation Move. Prior to forming Magic Lab, Marks and his team took a similar experimental approach to their work. Marks says that part of his team’s job is to serve as the glue between different divisions of Sony, to keep them all up to speed on what other groups are attempting and to help out when certain groups start to push something forward. "They’re supposed to be kind of experimental." "We wanted to call it Magic Lab so you understand they might not all come out as products," he says. On the day of Polygon’s visit, Marks shows a television screen that appears white to the naked eye, but when he holds a magnifying glass up to it, reveals a PS4 menu running on the screen. The team’s cubicles resemble a science lab, with a miniature drone, 3D cameras, Nerf toys, an Emmy and a telescope scattered around. For a sales conference, they made a game that 300 people could play simultaneously on a 100-foot screen. For a PlayStation 4 launch event, Marks and his team made a version of the classic game Breakout that attendees could play on the ground with their feet. Sometimes the group develops projects with no commercial intent. Magic Lab is researching eye tracking, for instance, to see if that’s a practical way to control games. They work on "pie in the sky" ideas and spend their days looking at what technology research is happening in the world, thinking about how it might apply to PlayStation. In 2016, he’s the director of a group called "Magic Lab" - a formalized name for what he and two others have been doing for many years, with more freedom. Others never made it to stores, like a way to connect Sony’s AIBO robot dog to PS2 and train it with a controller, or a high-end camera peripheral similar to what Microsoft released with Kinect. Some have taken off, such as the EyeToy camera that let PlayStation 2 players see themselves on the screen and play with simulated objects floating around them, like a weatherman on the evening news. Since starting at Sony in 1999, Marks has worked on a variety of experimental ways to interact with PlayStation games. With any luck, Marks says he hopes it lives up the the expectations players have built up in their heads. and Japan to meet with Marks and other key figures, to learn more about how Sony’s VR project came to be. He’s one of hundreds of people who have worked on the headset over the past five years, shaping it from a hacked-together amalgamation of off-the-shelf parts into a futuristic-looking headset appearing in fashion magazines.Īfter a long development road, the headset is now scheduled for release later this year, and Sony recently invited Polygon to its PlayStation headquarters in both the U.S. Today, Marks is one of the public faces behind PlayStation VR, Sony’s entry into the increasingly crowded virtual reality market. Your memory somehow forgets that the previous piece of hardware wasn’t quite what you wanted." And a lot of times the hardware didn’t deliver up to the expectation. "The most exciting thing when we’d get new hardware," he says, citing the ColecoVision Super Action Controller as an example. Surrounded by open boxes, he played everything and recommended the best games to customers.Ītari 2600 games. But for the young Marks, who held the title of chief demo officer, working there was like living in an arcade. It was the early ’80s used game sales weren’t common, and the store - Video Exchange - ran on the gimmick that customers could trade in their games. When Richard Marks was in 10th grade, his father opened a video game store that was ahead of its time. ![]()
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