Sony has patented a new AI tech an with “on-demand accessibility system” to assist visually challenged gamers in having a more immersive experience. Sony recently released a handheld PlayStation Portal for gamers to have a remote gameplay experience and is focussing more on their hardware in future consoles and controllers, bringing more features. Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller was also designed to help physically challenged gamers easily control characters in their favorite Xbox and PC games.
With their new AI tech, Sony will also look to add support to a lot of their renowned games, bringing more options to choose from for visually challenged gamers.
Sony’s Tech to Have a Breakthrough in Inclusive Gaming, by Making Games Audibly Accessible
Sony’s new patented AI tech will have an on-demand accessibility system that is bound to make use of modules on their DualSense controller. The tech will look to produce audible descriptions of scenes and provide feedback to the player through the controllers. The accessibility system can be activated using different modules including an action description module, acoustic effect annotation, graphical style, and color accommodation.
All of these different feedbacks will then be coupled with the feedback on the DualSense controller to describe all the action on screen to the player through captioning and audible descriptions. Visually challenged gamers will, hence, get a lot more accurate understanding of what’s being represented on the screen, which would be a lot more than what was achieved through captioning.
New Tech Could be Implemented on the PlayStation 5 System But Might Not Support Open-World Games
A neural network, a component system encoder-decoder, and the system memory will all be used fair advantage for accurate descriptions to be produced in Sony’s PlayStation 5. Sony will be looking to utilize the data from the DualSense Controller to detect player movement, button presses, and frame changes, and also grab all the audio cues that are played through the built-in speaker on the PlayStation 5.
Through the patent, Sony is also looking to bring their new system and implement it in movies, and TV shows as well, that’s watched through their consoles, and finally music as well. A lot of the modern games do come with closed-captioning options but Sony’s also targeting games that do not have this option by default.
Open-world games like Horizon: Forbidden West or Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding, however, might not be ready to be implemented with this accessibility system just yet. While this tech may be implemented in some of the upcoming PlayStation games, it may take a while before it’s fully implemented since training the neural network efficiently to provide the right feedback to players is something that will still take a while.
Also Read: Modern Warfare 3 Beta Set to Debut on PlayStation
Newly Announced Portable Device by Sony Named PlayStation Portal, to Cost $199
Sony’s newest hardware accessory to the PlayStation 5 is named PlayStation Portal and is announced to be a remote-playing device, for gamers to stream games from the consoles to the handheld device. The portable device has an 8-inch 1080p LCD screen and can be charged through a USB-C port, although the battery life has not been confirmed by Sony yet. Sony has also not revealed a release date for the portable device, with the price set at $199.
Though the Portal is priced far less than the Steamdeck or the Switch, one of the major downfalls is the device being a cloud-based, streaming device, rather than a standalone portable gaming device. Steamdeck and Switch, however, have been quite successful for being exactly that, as gamers didn’t need a console to be connected to the portable devices. Whether or not the Portal will also be just as successful will remain to be seen once the device is released.
Source: GameRant
