Sony PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino Outlines AI Strategy to Enhance Immersion and Streamline Game Production While Preserving Human Creativity
Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino recently presented in a corporate strategy briefing the increasingly expanded role of AI within the PlayStation sphere. He defined the technology as a significant weapon designed to allow more intense immersion for players, as well as new avenues for entertainment of favorite characters. The Sony team insists these will create a more optimized production environment and not reduce personnel.
Internal studios are currently employing AI tools to automate redundant workflow procedures in software engineering and quality assurance. An example in particular was given by Nishino; it is called Mockingbird, a tool which creates 3 dimensional facial animations using performance capture data. The process formerly took many hours; the new software reduces the time to less than 1 second. Other programs work with hair animation; a tool named Video to 3D Hair takes a video of a real hairstyle, creates a 3 dimensional model composed of hundreds of separate strands. The intention of all of this work is to allow creative personnel to avoid laborious work and instead spend their time on developing more expansive game worlds.
The Sony platform business is currently in the process of leveraging AI to develop systems of payment processing and store curation. They hope to develop a user interface that functions as a consumer oriented engine recommending specific moments of play and merchandise based on individual fan interest. Nishino explained that while this process will not surpass manual curation in all cases, the heart and soul of a PlayStation game will be developed from human designers and players.
These steps are a response from Sony as an initiative to lower the barriers to entry and to shorten the production process. While it is true that less time dedicated to mundane tasks such as 3D modeling and animation can lead to the release of a wider variety of games, this move comes during a time where job security in the game industry is a prevalent topic and it is speculated that we may witness an increase in less original titles. The cost of utilizing these resources for the consumer also continues to rise, due to their extreme computational demands.
According to Nishino, the intended purpose of these technologies is not to replace studio personnel but rather to aid them. Sony has indicated its intent to utilize its vast array of intellectual properties and its integrated ecosystem to deliver state of the art entertainment. In the near future, the company will focus on implementing AI in areas that require a large amount of data processing, while human imagination is likely to remain a key component.
