Yesterday, we ran a story about a panel in which Haven Studios CEO Jade Raymond and chief technology officer Leon O'Reilly talked with PlayStation 4 and 5 hardware architect Mark Cerny about the studio's experiments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how such technologies might shape the industry in the future.
After the panel, we are given a chance to speak with O'Reilly and Raymond about the Montreal studio's hopes for the new tech. Both been around the games industry for a while, and they've seen a variety of heavily hyped new technologies come down the pipe – digital distribution, stereoscopic 3D, AR, VR, cloud streaming – and succeed or fail to widely varying degrees. Wtih that in mind, we ask if their attitude toward each "next big thing" has changed over the years.
"I'm still very optimistic," O'Reilly says. "We're very focused on game development for a lot of these technologies, and we're very clear on what problems we're trying to solve and how these will more efficiently solve them. When you have consumer-facing technologies, you don't always know whether there's going to be a market there for your technology or not, and that's often why they fail.