Sony Patents To Add Modern Accessibility Features To Existing Older Games

Sony is undoubtedly one of the leading figures in adding accessibility features to its entree of AAA games. Its latest idea wants to take things up a notch and include these wonderful options in existing older games. The giant conglomerate has recently published quite an innovative patent that intends to bring the wonders of modern accessibility options to older games for its huge community of disabled gamers.

While it is increasingly common for videogames to have captioned voice acting for the hearing impaired, other impairments such as vision impairments receive no accommodation. Additionally older movies and games did not include captioning,” mentions Sony.

The patent dubbed “SCENE ANNOTATION AND ACTION DESCRIPTION USING MACHINE LEARNING” seeks to bring subtitles, text to speech descriptions, color changes, style changes, and more to older titles using the power of artificial intelligence. The patent argues that while it has become increasingly common in recent years, not all older games have these accessibility features.

Thus, it proposes an on-demand accessibility system that can provide improvement and more options to existing games to improve the accessibility to disabled users. The system may also offer aesthetic benefits to Sony titles for gamers wanting to use captions or other visual changes to improve gameplay. This on-demand accessibility method will work without needing to modify the old games.

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The On Demand Accessibility system applies subtitles, text to speech description, color changes and style changes to aid in accessibility of videogames and other media to those with disabilities.”

The proposed method by Sony will use different modules to apply each accessibility option for disabled gamers. These modules will work in harmony using trained neural networks to showcase the required changes. The on-demand accessibility system can be a “stand-alone device, integrated as an add-on device to the host system, or simulated in software by the host system.”

The screen annotation module will generate captions by analyzing game scenes. The graphical style module even has the ability to change the art style of a game by intertwining color pallets, textures, and backgrounds of different games. In other words, a game with the anime art style, Fortnite, could look like Grand Theft Auto 5 with a more realistic art style, as the patent describes in detail.

For example, a video game like Fortnight has vibrant green and red colors for the environment and characters while a game like Bloodborne has washed out and dark brown colors for the environment and characters. The Graphical Style Modification component may take the vibrant green and red color style pallet and apply it Bloodborne.”

Disabled users are currently quite hindered due to a lack of accessibility features and struggle to play popular games that may not have the needed options. Adding these options to older entries using the newly proposed on-demand accessibility system would be a gargantuan benefit for disabled gamers. Moreover, the accessibility system implemented in games could also be automated by this tech in the foreseeable future.

Sony has patented a bundle of stunning ideas to increase accessibility and assistance features in its games. Some of its recent proposals include a way to fix your posture while playing games. It has also recently secured a document to improve the voice chat quality in games for disabled users. Additionally, the publisher also wants to add a common help system that generates a “help map” in its games using AI.

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