All signs are pointing to Sony doubling down on its VR bet with the upcoming PlayStation 5.
That said, patent filings have to be taken with a huge lump of salt.
Usually they discuss things that are either years away or something that isn’t even viable for consumer application.
But every once in a while we get something that comes across our desks that we’re like “wow, that makes sense.”
This is one of those things.
And if it works out in Sony’s favor, it could change virtual reality forever.
We’re not kidding.
Computer.com describes nothing less than a revolution in how we control games in VR, writing of the patent that it features “a full-body, gyroscopic device that changes the direction of a user’s body and display unit mounted on the user’s head. In other words, your whole body becomes the controller.”
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From the patent filing directly:
“Disclosed herein is a posture control system containing a posture control unit that changes a direction of a user’s body and a display unit mounted on a user’s head,…The posture control system includes: a posture data acquiring unit configured to acquire posture data indicating the direction of the user’s body; a motion sensor data acquiring unit configured to acquire motion sensor data indicating a direction of a user’s face in a real space which is detected by a motion sensor; a camera image data acquiring unit configured to acquire camera image data indicating the face direction with reference to the direction of the user’s body which is specified based on a camera image; and a face direction specifying unit configured to specify the direction of the user’s face based on the posture data, the motion sensor data, and the camera image data.”
Like we said, there’s no guarantee that anything like this will actually come about.
In fact, more likely than not it won’t.
But it does give us some insight into what directions Sony is thinking about with its next-gen VR.
Namely, Sony is looking at a control scheme that is both more intuitive and immersive.
This is kind of the holy grail of VR at this point: Making a game that moves and interacts as closely as possible with how you would perform those physical actions in the real world.
An must-needed next step, this is what a lot of technology developers in the VR space will likely start to focus on once they’ve fully liberated the headset across all makes.
When we arrive in a world where VR headsets don’t need to be tethered to computers to work then the next leap will be in making the controls for those headsets more intuitive, immersive, and less complex as well.
There’s been a lot of wild stuff out there about the next-gen PSVR. If only a small fraction of it is true, Sony could come to dominate the VR market in the near future with no one else even coming close.
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