A recently discovered patent filed by Sony Interactive Entertainment suggests that the company is currently working on technology that completely change the way we interact with open-world games.
As discovered by Gaming Route, Sony appears to have filed a patent for "AI-generated internal environments". The patent was filed last year, and published just last month. But, erm, what exactly is it?
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According to the patent's description, Sony has developed a method of "using a trained machine learning model to infer interior data for the physical objects based on the exterior data." It also mentions "interior data describing inferred internal structures of the physical objects, and generating the virtual environment using the exterior data and the interior data."
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If that description left you scratching your head, you're far from alone. What it sounds like is that Sony has developed a method of generating building interiors based on their exteriors. As you can see from the patent image below, it looks as if the method will scan information from a building's exterior to generate a fully-realised interior.
No doubt this method will have other handy uses in terms of landscape generation and building open worlds, but the idea of an AI that generates entire building interiors could have massive implications for exploration in video games. Take a game like Marvel's Spider-Man, for example. New York City is absolutely massive, which is why you've probably noticed when you peer through the city's many windows that there are typically four or five interiors recycled over and over again. Developing a unique interior for every building would take a crap-ton of work.
This patent suggests Sony is working on a method that would eliminate the main heft of the work, with an AI procedurally generating interiors based on the shape, size, and structure of each building. The reason we rarely see open-world games with a ton of explorable interiors is that they take time and effort to design, so this could be a huge step forward for that particular hurdle.
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As always, a filed patent doesn't always mean a company is moving forward with it. Hopefully Sony does develop this idea though - it could genuinely be the next big leap forward for truly immersive open-world games. Watch this space.
Featured Image Credit: SonyTopics: GAMING, News, PlayStation, Spider-Man