As one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers Sony stands on the bleeding edge of new technology, and Augmented Reality is one of the fronts the company wants to push.

Basically put, Augmented Reality is the practice of superimposing 2D and 3D images onto existing video feeds in real time. The technology is already at work with the PS3's camera peripheral, the Playstation Eye, and first popped up with the collectible card game Eye of Judgment. But that was old hat, already a couple of years old. A recent demo at CEDEC 2009 showed how far things have come along, with the Playstation Eye being used to recognize faces, subsequently turning stomaches and scarring psyches the world over.

The demo video which you can see below the jump, shows off the camera's capabilities. The new software can apparently recognize details as small as which eyes the subject is blinking, their facial expressions, and even tell apart gender and age. Some concepts included automatically assigning certain 3D model data to certain faces, such as children automatically being turned into animal-faced monstrosities, or women being  masked by 3D anime mugs, then thrown straight into the uncanny valley.

Somehow this reminds me of scenes from Ghost in the Shell, when a hacker automatically censored his face by masking it with a smiley symbol.