Back at CES, Sony unveiled its new 360 Reality Audio tech that can be utilized by headphones or speakers to basically transform music and audio into a surround sound experience. Think Dolby Atmos, but from Sony.

It's incredibly impressive tech that has the chance to especially impact gaming, but unfortunately Sony hasn't added the tech to the gaming space. But that could be changing soon.

Speaking to Forbes, Head of the Branding and Product Planning Division at Sony Video and Sound Products, Kichiro Kurozumi, revealed that Sony is looking into bringing the tech to gaming.

“We’d like to start very, very simple, so we can make a good foundation, a strong core, for a future-proof technology," said Kurozumi responding to whether 360 Reality Audio might have implications beyond just music. "But of course, we are thinking about two or three directions in the future. One, obviously, is applying 360 sound to video. But also we’re thinking about what it would be like applied to games. Especially in an interactive capacity.”

As you can see, it sounds like Sony is looking to bring the audio tech to gaming, but it also sounds like we won't be seeing it anytime soon, which leads me to believe we won't be playing any games that utilize it on PS4, but PS5 is a whole different story.

As Forbes points out, the reason Sony has yet to support Dolby Atmos on the PS4 may be because it wants to avoid paying licensing fees to Dolby when it has its own solution in the pipeline.

Hopefully it's coming soon, because with the Xbox One making leaps in audio tech recently -- like the news that Xbox One will be getting Dolby Atmos upmixing for all sources -- Sony is running the risk of considerably lagging behind in audio support.

Posted: Mar 04, 2019 7:45 pm
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/03/03/ps5-ps4-audio-feature-360-reality/