The partnership between Sony and Niantic promises to open a new path for immersive environments where the environment (sound, in this case) merges with reality. For now in a video game, but the step towards applications in professional fields is not so long …
This Tuesday we want to make a brief foray into the world of augmented reality and immersive environments from the perspective of video games. The news we report is the partnership between Sony and Niantic, a company that develops softwares based on augmented reality, and produces the popular game Ingress, among others. Sony has in fact produced an headset that allows you to merge the spatialized sound environment of the video game with the sounds of reality around the player.
But beyond the news itself, the aspect that seems most interesting is the user experience: the collaboration between Niantic and Sony promises to extend the sensory experience beyond what you can see, and to create a border environment between the real and the virtual. An interesting cue for all those who are working on the development of immersive and hybrid environments, between real and digital, for the most diverse uses: from training in areas where experimentation on the real world can be difficult, expensive or risky (like surgery courses, airplane pilots, etc. …) to the re-creation of environments, situations and objects that no longer exist, but that have great value for our history: archaeology already uses digital tools to recreate and study objects or environments of the past. But the cue is also useful for all those experiments that, since the beginning of the pandemic, aim to recreate alternative environments to reality for work and study, and that can be sufficiently effective and rewarding to offer an experience for the user maybe not at the level of reality, because the pandemic has already taught us that at the moment the experience of reality is not replaceable, but that maybe it is able to offer something alternative and different that sums up with reality. And on this point the world of video games has a lot to teach us.
