There was an arcade in the shopping mall near my school when I was a teenager, which meant I spent a lot of time there slacking off and being cool. My friends mostly wanted to take hilariously edited photos of ourselves in the Japanese-style photo booths to keep in our wallets (have you seen what those things do to your face?), but we’d also play games like Para Para Paradise, Dance Dance Revolution, and Taiko no Tatsujin.
Occasionally, we’d even venture out of our comfort zone and play some Time Crisis. It was always a sight to behold – a row of teenage girls in identical pinafores, shouting and firing pretend pistols into a screen, arms swinging wildly as we shot at every single enemy that came our way.
Sony’s Tech Might Actually Be The Future
I hadn’t thought about this in years, but new technology revealed by Sony at CES 2025 brought all those memories rushing back. Sony’s Future Immersive Entertainment Concept basically fills a room with high-end TVs and lets you feel like you’re actually in a virtual world.
The video Sony released demonstrating this technology used The Last of Us as an example. We see a crew building what is essentially Disney’s 3D Projection System, Stagecraft, which creates a 3D visual environment around actors that changes in real time to match the camera’s perspective. It basically replaces green screen tech and has been used in shows like The Mandalorian and House of the Dragon.
But Sony’s version doesn’t just display, it interacts. We see people walking around the set, shining flashlights that light up the environment and the things in it. We even see people shooting clickers as they emerge from cover. The video says the tech can use “audio, haptics, scent, and atmospherics”, implying that you’ll be able to feel your gun shooting and smell your enemies getting shot. Ew.
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But The Future Is Far Away
I can’t say I particularly want to find out what a Clicker smells like, or have a visceral experience where I shoot things to death and watch them fall to pieces. But the concept is cool. If arcade shooters were a sort of predecessor to VR, then VR is a predecessor to this prototype. You could play scenes from your favourite PlayStation games and feel like you’re really in them.
There is something very ‘theme park’ about the whole experience, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if Sony makes use of this technology for bespoke attractions in the years to come.
I generally don’t care about the ‘immersiveness’ of video games, because there’s only so much that you can wring out of something you play with a controller while sitting in front of a screen. This, though, is an entirely different medium. While I imagine it would only work with static settings as is, there could be a future where you could walk around a level using some combination of this and Disney’s Holotile floor. A very expensive future, but the fact it could be a possibility at all is enough to excite me.
I’m not usually one to go gaga over new tech (I’m a late adopter – I like to know something’s going to work before I get invested) but the teenager in me is screaming and waving a plastic gun in the air. I would pay $50 to go into a room made of TVs and shoot mushroom people with my friends. That won’t be happening anytime soon, but if this proof of concept ends up becoming a reality, I’ll be first in line for my turn.
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