In August a patent filed by Sony appeared to be a PlayStation 5 development kit and a few days later Codemasters senior artist Matthew Stott took to Twitter to confirm the console is a PlayStation 5. “It’s a dev kit, we have some in the office,” he tweeted. Developers have normally signed all sorts of NDA’s forbidding them to talk about the new consoles so that probably explains why the Tweet was deleted.
A few days later Letsgodigital, the site that originally spotted Sony’s mysterious console patents, mocked up some 3D renders of what the console might look like and it looked pretty sexy, and now we finally have photographic proof of the real thing.
Ta, and indeed, daaaaaah!
YouTuber ZONEofTECH has somehow got his hands on the console and you can watch the video below. We should point out that development kits rarely look like the final product released to consumers but given how many cooling vents there are in this beast the final design will probably feature those.
Earlier this month Sony revealed another handful of details about their highly-anticipated next-gen console, from the console’s name, to the system software and some new technology coming to their next-generation controller. They have also revealed the release window and you have about a year to wait as the console will launch for Christmas 2020.
The PlayStation 5 is going to be called officially called the PlayStation 5. Jim Ryan confirmed this while giving Wired an exclusive look at the console hardware. “It’s nice to be able to say it. Like a giant burden has been lifted from my shoulders,” he claimed. Such a trade secret slipping out would surely have tanked Sony’s next-gen sales.
He and Mark Cerny also doubled down on some of the technical details of the next-gen console. There was confirmation that there is GPU hardware acceleration for ray-tracing, which was ever-so-slightly ambiguous before; the SSD will be super fast, but it’s being used in a more interesting way so that you can install just the parts of the games you want; the PS5 will support 100GB Blu-ray discs, making that selective installing a damn good feature to have. It was also confirmed that the drive will double up as a 4K blu-ray player.
Source: YouTube
tonyyeb
Utterly hideous. If the real thing is close to looking like that, I’ll need to keep it in a (heavily vented) box.
Stefan L
It won’t be. The original PS4 dev kit was a massive box, almost like a server rack.
wonkey-willy
soooo fake and this deluded fool even believes the shite coming out of his mouth.
“here we have the status lights which could be the number of controllers connected OR the number of cores running”
douche bag
camdaz
I wonder if Sony has designed the dev kits like they are to gauge the response of the public before finalising the look of the consumer model?
TSBonyman
Looks to me like all he got his hands on was a picture – of a PS5 development kit. :)
Anyhow, it’ll be interesting to see the final design but i expect it to be more ‘squared’ than that – unless there’s something extra to the design besides the cooling requirements – ie non-camera reliant tracking technology for PSVR 2 – but that’s a wild guess.
Stefan L
PSVR 2 will most likely adopt inside-out camera tracking built into the headset itself. That’s where the industry is heading in general, anyway.
MrYd
PSVR2 might use a combination of inside-out tracking and the current PSVR system. That patent the other week? Cameras and LEDs all over the headset.
And if the PS5 is going to support the current PSVR, it’s going to need to support a camera to track the lights on it. That patent could mean it uses both, or the LEDs are for backwards compatibility.
Is there a reason not to use both methods at once? I suspect inside-out is good for tracking your body moving around the room, but not necessarily so good for tracking controllers, which could easily move out of view of the headset cameras.
Stefan L
Patents are always pretty abstract when compared to the final product. It could combine the two, but it’s clearly not necessary for accurate VR motion tracking and so more likely for backward compatibility with current controllers and.
Inside out tracking gives the headset a much wider field of view than you have as the player, so it can still easily keep visual track of controllers in the periphery, and rely on modern motion sensors when completely out of sight. It’s not that there isn’t a reason not to use both, and more that there’s not much of a reason to use both.
TSBonyman
Inside-out tracking yes but i was hoping the next version of the Move controllers would be based on wireless tracking rather than line-of-sight.
MrYd
“rely on modern motion sensors when completely out of sight”
Yes, that’s an option. But that only lets you track the movement of the controllers from where they last were. And as it’s never going to be that accurate, the errors soon pile up and your controller starts drifting all over the place. It’s fine briefly, or if you can trick it into working out the absolute position again (anyone with PSVR and an Aim controller in particular will know all about the “give it a good shake because it’s gone wonky again” trick).
I suspect PSVR2 will mostly rely on inside-out tracking, but it’s going to need the LEDs and an external camera for backwards compatibility. And the option to use that as well as the inside-out tracking is probably sensible. Look at the latest HTC headset, the Vive Cosmos. That’s got the option to use external tracking as well as inside-out. (For presumably a lot of extra money, but then I guess you get to use their Lighthouse thing, which is a ridiculously simple but clever thing).
I think there possibly is a reason to use both forms of tracking, but you can do a fairly decent job with just the one. The current PSVR does a remarkably good job with a cheap camera tracking 9 year old controllers, but if it can be improved, why not? And if it can be improved further, why not go for that as well? I doubt the PS5 is going to be lacking the power to spare a little bit for doing that as well.
TSBonyman
While that method works pretty well most of the time, when it goes wrong it can be immersion breaking and sometimes the Moves can get confused even in line of sight if one is behind the other, so a true 1:1 tracking system would be more ideal.
I have no experience of inside-out tracking but if the industry is moving that way i guess they know what their doing. xD
TSBonyman
*they’re
.
.
:(