Sony Patents Single Screen Two Player?

Do you remember the days when a racing game was nothing without a two-player split screen mode? Perhaps you yearn for the split screen in your modern FPS games, much like they had in TimeSplitters and GoldenEye 64?

Well maybe, just maybe, Sony are working on a little something to bring back those glory days of elbows flying on the sofa to distract your opponent.

A couple of patents filed last year but published recently have been unearthed by an amusingly titled blog called “Broke my Controller” and picked up on by Kotaku. It seems that there might be another use for that stereoscopic technology that is being pushed so hard by Sony recently.

The patents, viewable in PDF form here and here, clearly describe a method of shuttering alternating images to display one image to one player (or one set of glasses) and another image to another player. Thus having split-screen two-player without splitting the screen.

Each set of glasses is also shown with their own audio supply. The drawback, if these ever make it out of the Research and Development department, is that you need one of those gorgeous but prohibitively expensive 3D televisions. Very cool technology though.