Sony Interactive Entertainment has been exploring new ways to make the process of purchasing games more accessible and efficient in the near future. The worldwide PlayStation parent company has now expressed great interest in tapping into streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch which have proven to be greatly beneficial in bringing new games to a wider audience, something that unarguably shadows the traditional promotional means.
According to a recently granted patent, Sony can introduce a system where users can specify a point in a video of a game they are watching online, purchase the game, and play from that same point. The filing states that the proposed mechanism can be enabled for any video-registering platform, which includes the likes of YouTube and Twitch. Sony believes that players will “enjoy the game more” if they play the same instance they enjoyed watching online.
The proposed feature can only happen when the online media (video being played) will be understandable by the the client machine and the server machine, which is what the filed patent covers.
…an execution request receiving unit that receives an execution request for a game which is associated with a play point in a video that shows a play content of the game; a game situation data obtaining unit that obtains, from a storage unit that stores pieces of game situation data which indicate situations of the game that are associated with play points in the video, a game situation data that is identified based on a play point associated with the execution request; and a game executing unit that starts executing the game from a situation that is indicated by the game situation data obtained by the game situation data obtaining unit.
Elsewhere, Sony was recently granted a patent that utilizes a new rendering technique to potentially make virtual reality headsets more efficient.
PlayStation Virtual Reality 2 (PSVR 2) can be equipped to track the eye movement of the user to create saccadic masking periods. What Sony is aiming at here is for the PSVR 2 to only and smartly render frames that the user is currently looking at.
