Earlier this week, an official PlayStation video leaked online — showing a prototype demo of someone talking to an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden Dawn — and those who saw it have been reminded of "Project Milo".
Sony has clearly been very keen to take it down ever since, so we're not going to host the full video in this article, but you can view a little snippet of it in the image down below (thanks, The Verge).
In the presentation, a member of the PlayStation Studios Advanced Technology Group explains that the prototype is simply just a "glimpse of what is possible", and then introduces the demo which shows him talking to the character and receiving real-time responses to his questions, both in a face-to-face setting and when playing the actual game. He asks about things like her character's background, the environment she's traversing, and even what the current time is.
There's nothing to suggest Sony is actively trying to push this technology into its current games right now, as it sounds like this prototype was made pretty quickly and with a small staff, but clearly it's a hint at what the future might hold.
And of course, we saw something very similar to this back in the Project Milo days! For those who don't recall it, Project Milo was a highly ambitious experiment for the Xbox 360 Kinect that racked up massive attention back at E3 2009, showing a real person talking to a virtual boy called Milo and receiving very lifelike responses.
Project Milo was seemingly too ahead of its time though - it never ended up coming to market, and the E3 presentation was ultimately classed as a "tech demo". Over 15 years later, Sony clearly seems keen to experiment with it again!