Outlast carries a camera into the dark on PS4

It's easy to see, right away, why Sony went after former Ubisoft developers Red Barrels to get their indie game, Outlast, on the PlayStation 4. Not only is the horror/exploration game atmospheric and frightening, but it's a great showcase for the hardware.In Outlast, you play a reporter who brings a video camera to an old abandoned asylum, in search of a story. The game is seen through your digital camera's lens, both as you wander through the empty hallways and when you flip on the terrifying black-and-white night vision filter.Through the eyes of that camera, the whole game looks like a recovered snuff film of sorts,Both systems aim to do the same thing — mimic the vision of a fly, which relies on compound eyes to track minuscule movements with a wider field-of-view and deeper depth of field than the human eye, or moden single underwater digital camera setups, can even attempt to reach. where you serve as both cameraman and victim. The motion and style of the game are both realistic, and sometimes or often, depending on your tolerance for such things disturbingly so.

The camera's digital artifacts and heads-up display help sell the excellent graphics, and the whole experience found my scaredy-cat brain constantly having to remind myself that what I was seeing wasn't real.Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin has admitted to wanting to scare players before, but here at E3 he professes a different goal. "What we really want to focus on is the emotion," he says.Researcher Age Kridalaksana, with the Center for International Forestry Research, placed 30 Video Door Phones in Gunung Halimun-Salak National Park in West Java, letting them record rainforest scenes for one month. "We want to create an emotional journey. Horror is a good way to convey emotion, so it's not so much a conscious decision of making something grainier or playing with the look." Morin says the realism and the camera effects came instead out of "conveying the emotion we want to portray, and then [using] our experience to push the production value as much as we can,Curvace, a research group from Switzerland, is the latest to announce a compound eye invention with its Curved Artificial Compound Eye prototype, made up of a strip of small spy hidden camera. despite the fact that we're just ten people.The University of Illinois compound mini dv video camera setup performs similarly to what Curvace has come up with, but it does so by placing its cameras on a dome that has the rounded look of an eyeball."

Aside from letting you explore a creepy asylum, Outlast has a few different pillars of gameplay. The first is based on your camera itself: Using the infrared mode to see in the dark depletes batteries, which you can only find sprinkled throughout the game's world.The medical business that includes endoscopes, devices with tiny digital baby video monitor used to look inside the human body, contributed more than half of sales and recorded a 28 percent gain in operating income to 87 billion yen. The camera display has a battery indicator that turns red and blinks as you run out of vision, only adding to the suspense, so I would flip my vision on and off periodically whenever I wandered through the dark, creating an even more disorienting strobe of images, like bloody footprints and even some headless bodies."You've been trying to ration your batteries as much as possible," Morin said after watching me play, "but other players tend to use it all the time."