The PlayStation: Sony's contribution to UbiComp?
The original PlayStation launched in December 1994, almost 28 years ago. Since then, it has gone through a few major and multiple minor iterations to its now-current version — the PlayStation 5. This ecosystem of gaming consoles has not only influenced the market of at-home gaming but was also a huge financial success for Sony, the company behind those consoles. According to Sony itself, the original PlayStation was sold 100,000 times on its initial launch and was the first gaming console that reached 100 million sold units worldwide.
The Ecosystem
Until the current days, Sony and game developers build a whole ecosystem around the PlayStation console. While it never lost its main purpose as a gaming system, you are able to explore games in different ways. Most of the games relied on the DualShock Controller as their handheld interface but Sony allowed game developers also to create their own controllers for their games. So, there were also games or game franchises like SingStar or GuitarHero that offered alternative controllers to create an even more unique experience for those games.
Both games used music for their in-game experience. GuitarHero (for PlayStation 2) came with a guitar-shaped controller for its game. Though it was a different input device, the input was still created through your fingers pushing different buttons. This was different for SingStar. Sure, you needed the DualShock controller to navigate through the game menus but for the competition itself, they were unnecessary. Because SingStar was a competitive singing game, it needed vocal input. Therefore, you had to plug microphones into your PlayStation in order to record your voice.
EyeToy
Unique for its time was the release of EyeToy in 2003. This was a USB-powered camera that could be connected to a PlayStation 2 console. This camera was used by special EyeToy games as the main input device. The game was able to track body movements through the camera and trigger certain actions. This meant a player doesn’t need any controller because their body was their game controller.
This was the groundwork for what later would become PlayStation Move in later generations. Sony figured out that, while users enjoyed using their whole bodies in games, they also liked to have precise controls over what actually happens in the games. Because of its early stage, accuracy was something EyeToy lacked. So the main learning was, to step a little back and provide users with controllers that are able to track their movements in a more precise way.
The uniqueness of the original console
One thing the PlayStation inventors introduced on the original launch was the usage of a new medium — the CD-ROM — for their games. Other competitors like Nintendo were instead using cartridges to store their games on. This was a huge advantage at that time because on the one hand, CD-ROMs were cheap to produce, and on the other hand, they allowed more data to be stored. Furthermore, this leads to more complex games and advanced graphics for games on the PlayStation platform.
Despite that, CD-ROM had one major drawback. It is a read-only medium. This means that the console is not able to save any data, like a user’s game progress, on those disks. To address this issue, Sony introduces a memory card that was used as storage for user data. The form of these memory cards, in turn, looked a lot like cartridges from Nintendo consoles. Though these cards were mandatory to store game settings and progress on, the actual console was sold without them, so users had to buy them separately.
Media Center
Since the release of the PlayStation 2, the console has been more and more shaped into a multimedia center rather than sticking only to the gaming aspect. In its first iteration, the PlayStation 2 could also be used as a DVD-Player to also watch movies on your TV. The PlayStation 3 was then upgraded to a Blu-Ray Player that allowed you to watch movies in an even higher quality. The next major change came through the PlayStation 4 through which users can also access a variety of different streaming services like Netflix or Disney+.
Is the PlayStation (ecosystem) also a ubicomp system?
Though there might be no clear answer to that question because it is influenced by how you would define ubicomp devices in general. Mark Weiser described them as “weav[ing] themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. But this ubicomp vision is from 1991 where TVs were big chunky boxes in someone’s living room and digital gaming was far from becoming a mainstream activity. What is still similar is, that a TV was basic equipment for a living room, and this is still true today. What has changed though, is the usage itself. It has shifted away from linear cable TV towards individual and asynchronous streaming services, which can also be accessed through gaming consoles. These entertainment systems are often used for recreational purposes, but they also do not fulfill any specific use case aside from that. Because they are no “invisible” parts of everyday life, you may argue that gaming consoles and especially the PlayStation is not an ubicomp system.
But I’d like you to look at gaming consoles from a different angle. While they might not be a ubicomp system in itself but they are definitely useful for ubicomp research. Earlier I described the EyeToy system. This was an early motion-tracking system that provides useful information for ubicomp systems because you can see it as an experiment on how people can interact with digital devices without using specific control gear. A useful research result, that might have broader implications, as described earlier, is that people like to have a control device in order to have more precise steering power. While these results are 15 to 20 years old it may be also an interesting research if these findings are still valid or if this has changed because of more precise motion-capturing techniques.
