CES: Sony’s Immersive Engineering

Hi all, hope you are well! CES is happening this week and everyone was expecting an impactful announcement from one of the big players, but I don't think many were expecting this!

Sony enters the Industrial XR market!

In my last newsletter I predicted that 24' will be a good year for XR hardware, and it seems like we are already on track! I was honestly not expecting this release at all, may it be the first of many new exciting announcements!

Some may forget but Sony has been in the XR game for quite a while now, the PSVR 1 was released back in 2016! Since then, they have succesfully released the updated PSVR 2, which is one of the best gaming VR headsets in the market.

But those have been Playstation-only gaming products. This time Sony has decided to explore the enterprise world, putting engineering in focus.

'Immersive Engineering'

This term is being coined by Sony to describe the experience that their headset will be able to offer. The focus is quite clearly the creation and management of 3D assets in real time inside a fully virtual environment, or by bringing your asset into the 'real world' through the use of the Mixed Reality pass through.

Sony will be looking to assert partnerships with all the major players in the CAD and 3D modelling software space, the first one is with Siemens, who have worked closely with Sony to develop the headset and will be pushing this new product into the manufacturing world.

Yes, there are ways to review CAD models in VR already, but from what I am aware, the ability to review AND edit in the 3D environment seem to not exist yet.

In addition to this, the headset should be able to handle large and detailed models. It will ship with an impressive display quality that should rival Apple Vision Pro with a 4K Micro-oled display and top of line pass through. The headset will be flexing the new powerful Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 platform, which should have great processing power, but if that is not good enough users will be able to tether to a PC for more compute power.

The most exclusive aspect of the hardware will be the controllers, they have been designed with engineering in mind, there is a ring and a 'pointy' controller that promise to offer an extremely accurate way to handle 3D assets. There is also a flip-up display, it gives you a real Tony Stark vibe, which is what I experience when I put a HoloLens 2 on!

In the announcement video, the three main use cases are design, remote collaboration and project validation.

I think this is huge for engineers, many already use VR to review cad models and present virtual prototypes to clients. I also believe this could expand to other areas such as film production, as there is a huge amount of CGI involved in numerous projects.

See you next week,
Davi, MetaVisions