New Sony Controller Patent Augments Reality Again

Fed up with your DualShock 4? Tired of your Move controllers having absolutely no method of clipping together and swinging about? Sony hears you, brother. And they’ve recently registered a patent that might end up saving you from that handheld monotony.

Personally, I wish my DualShock 4 (if it wasn’t so shoddily shod in rubber) was the only controller I ever had to touch. I love it. Oh, and I wish my Move controllers weren’t quite so dusty and unloved. Still, I’m a fool for new tech and Sony’s inclusion of augmented reality, along with a peculiar Lego-esque appearance, might just be enough to extract yet another bundle of notes from my weary hands.

The patent, which looks bonkers, seems to show a couple of Move-like appendages, linked together like a kind of build-you-own-plastic-nunchucks arrangement. It also shows a weird kind of Bop-It! looking thing that’s being read by a camera. I tried to decipher what it might all mean by reading some of the text involved but let’s face it, patent text is always vague and impenetrable:

A block tool, which can be assembled by a user, is configured with multiple types of blocks and is shot by a camera for capturing a still image or a moving image. The position coordinates of a marker of the square-pillar block in a three-dimensional space are obtained by image recognition. Also, a connecting position and the type of each block, a gradient vector of the square-pillar block, an angle between two blocks constituting the square-pillar block, and the respective blocks’ lengths are obtained so as to derive the shape, posture, and position of the block tool, and corresponding information processing is then performed.

See? PlayStation Move: Lego Edition.

There’s no guarantee it’ll ever see light of day, of course, but it is certainly an interesting direction for their Move technology to, er, move in and it’s not the first time we’ve seen them thinking about controllers that clip together, or redesigned Move hardware, for that matter. Still, at least this one isn’t terrifying. What do you think?

Source: GAF via iGR