Sony Interactive Entertainment, owner of the PlayStation brand, has acquired Cinemarsive Labs, a British startup that develops tools to convert 2D photos and videos into 3D volumes. The startup team will join Sony’s Visual Computing Group, a research and engineering team focused on graphics technologies such as game rendering, video coding, and generative AI models.
Cinemarsive’s latest product is a virtual reality app called Parallax. It acts as a viewer for parallax photos (three-dimensional images that allow you to peer around with natural head movements) taken using a traditional smartphone or a professional camera with a stereo lens. The startup has developed a custom AI tool to convert 2D images into 3D volumes to enable parallax, and it appears Sony would like to apply that expertise to its own projects.
“Following the acquisition, the Cinemarsive Labs team will join SIE’s Visual Computing Group (VCG) and contribute to our broader efforts to advance cutting-edge visual computing in games,” Sony said. “This includes applying machine learning to enhance gameplay visuals, improve rendering techniques, and take visual fidelity for players to new levels.”
Machine learning is a major focus of Sony’s efforts to improve the graphics performance of the PlayStation 5 and future hardware. PlayStation 5 Pro is designed around a new GPU, faster storage, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a custom AI upscaling technology that allows the console to run games at lower resolutions and then upscale them to 4K. The company recently squeezed even more performance out of the Pro with an updated version of PSSR that it released in March. Sony is also working with AMD on Project Amethyst, a multifaceted collaboration to improve ray tracing and upscaling on future consoles.
