Is Sony jumping into the eye wear game? Probably not. But their most recent patent is leaving a lot of us scratching our heads. It seems as though they are making some sort of eye wear that will be conveniently placed inside of the PSVR headset. With that being said, the glasses offer eye-tracking. Something that isn’t inside of the PlayStation headset already.
The patent was published last week, and there have been no signs of any new headset plans. In this release, you will be able to find the details that Sony set out. There is an emphasis of the Sony headsets supporting the eye glasses. In virtual reality headsets, it is hard for the industry as a whole to decide what to do with glasses. Some major headsets support them heavily, and some don’t support them at all. Making the glasses very formidable with headsets, they just may be laying the ground work for an unannounced PSVR 2. Or something even more a little outlandish would be that Sony is planning to incorporate augmented reality with the eyewear, while keeping it virtual reality friendly.
Inside of the patent, regarding the eye sensing is this statement. It says that it will be able to determine “gaze information of the user in order to improve quality of content provided for rendering on the head mounted display.”
This could mean a lot of things, but this is what I get from it. When the glasses are working with the headset, this can take a lot of responsibility away from the headset itself, making it available for much more important things. This means the headset will not need to track your eyes. That is great news, but this may be better. While the glasses are tracking your eyes, it is able to improve the quality of what you’re actually focusing on, and keeping the rendering for other parts of the image at a minimum.
This still leaves a few questions. Why wouldn’t Sony just simply let PSVR 2 take care of the eye tracking? Will this work with PSVR right now? There are a few different possible answers. When these glasses release, the PSVR 2 will still be a ways away. With that being said, eye tracking inside of their headset right now would be a huge step for them. Because PlayStation is so often compared to the other PC ran headsets, eye tracking without having to release a new headset would give them a leg up in the competition. This may just be Sony’s play for the next year or so.
Another possibility is that the use of regular eye glasses will disrupt an already planned eye tracking on the next version of PSVR. All this may be set up simply for people who need to wear eye glasses can also access the great benefits of eye sensors and tracking. With all of that being said, it is still very possible that none of these explanations are any that Sony will use when releasing and revealing the glasses.
This is simply the latest of the patents we have seen from Sony, and it seems to have a somewhat large part in the upcoming future. The glasses will undoubtably be a step forward for the company, we are just unsure on where this step will be taking the future of this company.
