Digital eye adds telephony functions to Sega Dreamcast

Digital eye adds telephony functions to Sega Dreamcast
TOKYO — Sega Enterprise Co. Ltd. has developed a digital camera that adds TV telephony functions to the company's Dreamcast game console. Called Dreameye, the camera captures still and moving images that can be transferred over phone lines or the Internet, and makes it possible to give a user's face to video game characters.

Dreameye is scheduled to hit the Japanese market in June and overseas markets in autumn. Pricing has not yet been disclosed.

"Dreameye enables home TV telephony quite easily just using existing telephone lines and a home TV set. Such a home TV telephony system should be the world's first," said Hideki Sato, corporate senior vice president and the leader of Sega's home game console development.

Sega, which has been promoting Dreamcast as a network terminal and as a game console, has already sold 4.4 million Dreamcast units worldwide — 1.79 million in Japan, 1.86 million in the United States and 760,000 units in Europe. About one million of the consoles are connected to the Internet, Sato said.

Dreameye is a cigarette-pack-sized camera with a 310,000 pixel CMOS image sensor. PictureIQ Corp. (Seattle) has provided retouching software called DreamPhotoFun. When wired to Dreamcast, the camera shoots up to 25 seconds of moving images and stores them in a Dreamcast attachment called the Visual Memory card. Video and still images stored in a Visual Memory card and can be sent over the Internet as e-mail from the Dreamcast console.

The Dreameye camera and its microphone work as an input terminal for TV telephony when wired to Dreamcast and a home TV set.

KDD Corp., the top international telephone carrier in Japan, and KDD Technology Corp. collaborated with Sega on the video transmission and TV telephony technologies.

KDD developed video compression technology called "MeeTwo" which enables 5-to-10 frames/second of QCIF (Quarter Common Intermediate Format) images (with 176 x 144 pixel resolution) to be sent through a telephone line.

The TV telephony technology supports two types of connection — via the Internet or via a direct phone connection. The TV phone functions were demonstrated by connecting Tokyo with New York and Cannes, France using Dreamcast's built-in 33.4-kbit/second modem. (The Dreamcast consoles sold in the United States include an integrated 56-kbit/s modem.)

About 3-4 frames/second of QCIF images were transmitted through international telephone lines, and audio delays were about 700 milliseconds. Because the first priority was ontransmitting video images through a slow telephone line, Sato said the delay and quality are a tradeoff.

Sega also showed a prototype TV telephony system using broadband transmission; Sega and KDD are now working together on a broadband solution.

Sony's Playstation 2 game console, which will hit the Japanese market next month and is expected to be a large competitor to Dreamcast, will be aimed at broadband and especially CATV networks from the beginning.

"We are already carrying out field experiments with CATV operators for months, and now they are about to enter into the practical service based on Dreamcast," a Sega spokesman said.

Sato said, "Dreamcast has got an eye, which will enable new type of games. Game characters may have users' faces, and some games will incorporate image recognition. The eye will surely open new possibility of game."