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New Vita AR details

Captures your WAAR face.

Sony has detailed some of the PlayStation Vita's new AR capabilities, including markerless AR and a new Wide Area Augmented Reality feature, charmingly dubbed WAAR.

Whereas many AR systems use one marker point, WAAR uses six markers to create more detailed and defined play areas.

A demonstration of WAAR in action was shown at Sony's Vita-focused session at the Eurogamer Expo, showing tanks fighting across a tabletop and a floor being turned into a racing track.

Markerless AR, on the other hand, uses no cards whatsoever, with the Vita identifying a room's feature points.

A quick demo showed one of Ape Escape's stars dancing around a room, while later on in the presentation a Tyrannosaurus rex bounded around a cityscape, towering over the player.

Sony had previously revealed some of the features at last week's Tokyo Game Show, where it also revealed that certain PlayStation 3 games can be streamed onto the handheld.

Reality Fighters will be the first dedicated AR game on Sony's handheld, which launches in Japan on December 17 with a European release date yet to be announced.