A key Christmas product for Sony using technology developed by Oxford Brookes’ Computer Vision Group hit the shops last week (16 November). 

Complex computing from Oxford Brookes helped to create a ‘magical’ new technology called Wonderbook which is now on sale complete with a Book of Spells game from the World of Harry Potter series.

The all-new Wonderbook for the Sony PlayStation 3 uses a technology known as Augmented Reality (AR) and has been praised for its ‘technical wizardry’. 
Wonderbook’s AR uses objects in the player’s environment, captured through a camera, and mixes them with virtual objects presented in a game on screen. 

The contribution from Oxford Brookes was to enable the computer to distinguish the skin of the player’s hands from the background.