Sony Wants to Predict Your Wake Up DP By Using AI

The world of video game patents is a hellish but interesting place. Decades of potential progress can be undone by a video game company that thinks it has a right to sue people for giving you a game to play while something is loading.

The latest discovery in this field is not quite as appealing or amusing. Tech4Gamers recently found out that Sony has a patent that aims to reduce input latency in online video games. Sounds incredible on the surface, especially in the world of fighting games, where input latency and quality of netcode is scrutinized down to the most minute details.

There is one problem, however, and it's the way in which Sony chose to go about this. A lot of big tech companies seem desperate to propose AI-powered solutions to problems that either don't exist (hello Nvidia neural faces) or can't be solved by AI.

Their patent entry offers the explanation of the process that you can see below:

The issue might be apparent to anyone who played video games for any extent of time, or is vaguely aware of how technology works. To begin with, there would be a significant amount of latency required for the camera to pick up your inputs, process them, and feed them to the machine learning model or the proposed algorithm.

"But after the model learns your patterns, surely it could work" someone might say, but can you name a scenario where the camera looks at your inputs, and then an algorithm can reliably guess what you will do next? Fighting games often process dozens of inputs within a few seconds, and the precise order of those inputs is heavily dependent on the context. Combos are probably the only element where inputs might be very predictable, but we already don't have any real issues with those when rollback exists, and this tech is unlikely to make Japan to France connection into a buttery smooth experience.

It's puzzling what Sony was trying to cook here, to say the least, but gaming companies are not new to patenting even the most outrageous things, just ask the CoD community, or even Sony themselves.