Two recent patents of Sony hint a gaming pad and wearable bands for its upcoming PlayStation VR. The wireless gaming pad and wearable bands will free PlayStation VR from gaming controllers.
You probably have already heard the recent announcement of Sony launching their PlayStation VR – that earlier given a code name project Morpheus – in 2016. What you don’t know, that I am sure of, is that Sony will soon launch gaming pad and wearable gaming bands along with that VR headset.
We came across this information while browsing their recent patent filing where two among their 57 patents hints a gaming pad and a set of wearable band. Both of the patents describe detecting a gamer hand relative to Sony’s PlayStation VR.
The first patent 20150258432 – Gaming Device with Volumetric Sensing, describes a gaming pad. The gaming pad detects hand movement of a gamer by producing energy images that mirrors a current position of the gamer’s hand.
The gaming pad has energy emitters and energy sensors for producing energy images. For example, the pad can have ultrasonic emitter and microphone sensor or infrared (IR) emitter and infrared sensors.
Now let’s consider your gaming pad has IR emitter and sensors installed in that. So, when you will move your hands while playing a game, your hand movements will disrupt the IR signals. The IR sensor will sense this disruption to find the position of your hand.
Now in order to detect your hand movements, the sensor repeats the sensing to produces a stream of images.
In the next step, the sensors send image stream to the gaming console which, in turns, controls the gameplay.
The gaming pad frees gamers from wearing gloves and any attached device. This also solves the hygiene issues that some gamers use to have when a controller gets used repeatedly, over long time periods or shared between different users.
The second patent by Sony – 20150258431 – describes wearable bands for gaming. A gamer will be wearing band on both of his wrists.
Both bands will have multiple cameras to capture movement of other wrist. That is, cameras on the left wrist will be capturing images of the right wrist and vice-versa.
Apart from cameras, light emitting diodes (LED) and inertial sensors will also be installed in the gaming bands. The LEDs emit light in a round robin fashion to determine location of the wrist.
The inertial sensors are there to increase accuracy of detection of positions and orientation of hands if cameras and LEDs fail to do so.
So when you will play games on PlayStation VR wearing band on your wrists, the alternate cameras and LEDs will generate a stream of images of your hands and fingers. This stream will be sent to the gaming console that will determine the position and movement your hands.
Apart from that, the IR camera of Sony’s PlayStation VR, in both cases – when you use pad or bands, will also capture images. This will further increase the detection accuracy of your hand and finger movements.
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Can’t wait to get hands on it. It will be a completely new way to play games, without controllers. At first I was concerned about the accuracy but after reading till the end, it is clear that Sony has taken a great care of that. At least, it would be useful for guys with sensitive skins which makes them unable to use controllers for a long period. Thanks for this lovely article.
Hughes, glad that you liked it. Yes!! it takes the gaming experience to a new level. In the future, you won’t be taking gaming controllers along with you. People will be playing games on buses, metro, and the like on their commutes.
These controllers complement the VR gaming headset.
I am confused with how this PlayStation VR stuff works.
Hey Ethan, where you got stuck? Do let me know. I will explain the stuff for you man!
Just were Sony are going with this and how it’s going to be used, I still haven’t heard much about it.
Sony recently announced that it will launch its virtual reality gaming console. The name of that gaming console is PlayStation-VR .
Now this is post, well, is based on one of the patents filed by Sony on their PlayStation VR gaming console. It is, at present, not existing. Whatever mentioned in the post, for example the gaming bands or pads, will see the face of market sometime in the future.
Do you want to ask anything dude?
This all seems confusing and difficult to learn how to use.