While Microsoft bought up another company (this time, it’s Havoc), Sony also purchased up someone – they acquired the Belgian company Softkinetic. While it doesn’t sound like an interesting piece of news, they do have something on their hand that the Japanese console manufacturer can use for their own products. Softkinetic was an innovator of range image sensor technology…
Sony now has technology for time-of-flight too. This is a method that resolves the distance to an object. The distance is measured in pixels, and these are laid on top of the sensor in two dimensions, and it measures the flight time (aka delay) needed for the light to leave the light source, reflect off the object and get back to the image sensor. This is important for Sony.
Now while this technobabble doesn’t seem like something meaningful, this could be used for some certain PlayStation VR, which is going to launch next year for the price of a new platform (the question is: old or new price? 400 dollars or 350?) – for virtual reality, Softkinetic‘s acquisition is going to be really helpful for Sony in the future.
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