Sony Drives Its New EV Onstage With a PS5 Controller

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Speaker 1: Sony's press conference at CES 2024 just ended, and they once again brought out their Athea Electric car built in partnership with Honda. But this time, the head of Sony Honda Mobility drove it out from outside of the vehicle using a PlayStation dual sense controller. Now, you won't be able to do that when they actually get around to building these things. It's just for demonstration purposes here at the show. But they did want to highlight some new features and new technologies that they're talking about [00:00:30] on this electric vehicle. Here at the show. The key is going to be some of the new AI powered A DAS technology that's advanced driver aid and assistance technology. Now, this thing has an array of cameras and sensors around it that feed information that it gets from the environment through a neural network processor. All pretty standard driver aid stuff. Speaker 1: But this one, they're using the Unreal Engine to actually train their autonomous driving technology. Now, why would you use a video game engine for that? [00:01:00] Well, a lot of the information that the car is going to get from the environment comes from the various cameras around the car and the higher fidelity you can simulate that environment when you're training those cameras means the better you're going to get at detecting things like obstacles or pedestrians or things in the road. Now, somebody's not just using Unreal Engine to train its software, it's also using it in the dashboard to power the 3D graphics and visuals that you'll see on the dashboard display. And that can lead to all sorts of interesting ways that you can entertain yourself in the car while you're waiting for it [00:01:30] to charge. For example, maybe watching the new Spider Verse movie or streaming games to the dashboard, not out of the question. Speaker 1: Now finally, Sony announced that it is working in collaboration with, its in-House Game Studio, polyphony Digital, the ones that do the Grand Tomo series of racing games. They're going to be working to bring virtual and real life experiences together, whatever that means. But at the end of their showcase, they did show what looked like the ELA on a track in Grand Tomo. So my guess is that the car is come into the gate. If you want to learn [00:02:00] more about this vehicle, you can check out all of the covers that we've been doing, leading up to its launch over the years, over on cnet.com and there you'll also find the rest of what's happening here at CES.