AIBO Dog Lives On! New Pet, PS3 Compatible?

Dear AIBO enthusiast, apparently you have all the reasons to be happy, as a new version of Sony's robotic pet is under development.

You are probably aware that Sony announced it would discontinue AIBO and several other products as of March, 2006 and also stop the development of the QRIO robot. However, AIBO will still be supported until 2013, but the technology behind it will continue to be developed for use in other consumer products, as the robo-pets line is becoming popular.

AIBO's owners always enjoy to teach their pets new behaviors by programming them, using the special R-CODE language that only Sony uses. There are three generations robots launched on the market, but none of them is going to be so successful as the one that will support PS3, at least that's what the rumors say.

The PlayStation 3 is based on open and publicly available application programming interfaces. Sony has selected several technologies and arranged several sub licensing agreements to create an advanced software development kit for active developers, which of course includes the AIBO sub division.

The sub licensed technology includes complete game engines that also include Epic's Unreal engine 3.0., physics libraries and Havok's physics and animation engines. Some other tools include Nvidia's Cg 1.5 , which is a C-like shading language (HLSL was based upon it) and SpeedTree RT by Interactive Data Visualization and Kynogon's Kynapse 4.0.

PS3 will provide code for animation, compression (expected to greatly improve loading times), and many more features. According to TechDigest, the Sony pals are quite likely to see an upgraded version of the robo pet in the near future. "The engineers behind the Aibo are doing the PS3. We are talking about making something like the new Aibo.", said Matsuura for Brian Ashcraft.

Since AIBO didn't appeal to most of us, probably an upgraded PSP supported model will do the trick. Still prefer the real dogs.

Here's a sample of AIBO: