New Sony Patent Could Use AI and a Camera Pointed at Your Fingers to Work Out What Button You’ll Press Next
A new patent filed by Sony has detailed how the company may plan to cut down on latency in future hardware by using an AI model aided by additional sensors.
Sony introduced its first official upscaler, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), with the PlayStation 5 Pro. While the upscaler can upscale smaller resolutions to 4K, newer graphics technology such as frame generation can come at the cost of additional latency. This means that while you are getting additional frames, your games may not feel quite as responsive as a result.
GPU manufacturers AMD and Nvidia have sought to resolve this through Radeon Anti-Lag and Nvidia Reflex respectively, and now it appears Sony may develop a solution of its own.
First spotted by Tech4gamers, the Sony patent WO2025010132, titled “TIMED INPUT/ACTION RELEASE,” is designed to tackle and streamline the “timed release of user commands” via predicting what button you’re going to press next.
Sony’s rationale for the filing reads: “there can be latency between the user’s input action and the system’s subsequent processing and execution of the command. This in turn results in delayed execution of the command and unintended consequences in the game itself.”
The solution is described as having several parts running in conjunction: a machine-learning AI model designed to predict what input you are going to receive next, and an external sensor, with the example of a camera pointed at your controller to determine which input you are getting ready to press. “In one particular example, the method may include providing camera input as an input to a machine learning (ML) model,” the patent reads. “The camera input may indicate the first user command.”
Another potential use includes the sensor being a controller button itself. Considering that Sony has been a champion for analog buttons in the past, the company may use them in a next-generation controller.
While the technology as described in the patent might not make its way exactly as described in the PlayStation 6 (filings like these hardly ever do), it clearly shows that the company is looking to adopt similar technologies to cut down on latency without games feeling less responsive, especially considering the popularity of rendering tech like FSR 3 and DLSS 3, which add additional frame latency on whatever system they run on.
This will most likely benefit real-world scenarios like twitch shooters, which require both high framerates and low latency. But, whether or not this patent gets used in future hardware remains to be seen.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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