Sony has announced that it has acquired “machine learning and computer vision company” Cinemersive Labs, and that the new acquisition will join the nascent Visual Computing Group, which was started up back in June.
In a blog post on Sony’s website, the gaming and tech giant confirms that it has purchased Cinemersive Labs, although the amount for which the purchase was made wasn’t disclosed.
According to Sony, Cinemersive brings a “specialized team with deep expertise in computer vision and machine learning”. Sony says that Cinemersive’s expertise will be used in order to “enhance gameplay visuals, improve rendering techniques, and unlock new levels of visual fidelity” within games.
Although Cinemersive isn’t a traditional game developer, the company has created an “experience” for Meta Quest in the form of Parallax, which allows you to “immerse yourself into volumetric six-degrees-of-freedom 3D photographs”.
The official Cinemersive Labs website also touts the studio’s “Cinemersive AI” software, which “transforms a single photo shot into a volumetric 3D immersive experience”. That’ll be the machine learning element of the company that Sony is excited about.
Given Sony’s recent track record when it comes to shutting down internal studios, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Cinemersive’s days may be numbered thanks to this acquisition, but this isn’t a traditional developer, so it probably doesn’t have the same level of expectation on its shoulders.
Sony says it wants Cinemersive to advance its “broader efforts in advancing state of the art visual computing within games”, so it’s likely that you’ll see the company’s work on a more behind-the-scenes basis; don’t expect Cinemersive’s name to be front and center on any Sony production.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see exactly how Sony plans to integrate Cinemersive into its future work, but this does at least signal that, like many of its peers, the tech giant isn’t opposed to incorporating AI into its workflow.
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