Sony Interactive Entertainment, the parent company of the PlayStation brand, has announced its acquisition of Cinemersive Labs, a UK-based startup specializing in tools that transform 2D photos and videos into immersive 3D volumes. The team from Cinemersive will join Sony’s Visual Computing Group, which focuses on advancing graphical technologies including game rendering, video coding, and generative AI models.
Cinemersive’s latest innovation is a virtual reality application called Parallax. This app serves as a viewer for parallax photos—three-dimensional images that respond to natural head movements—captured using conventional smartphones or professional stereo lens cameras. Cinemersive created proprietary AI tools to convert 2D images into 3D volumes, and Sony appears eager to leverage this technology for its own future projects.
“After the acquisition, the Cinemersive Labs team will integrate into SIE’s Visual Computing Group (VCG) and enhance our comprehensive efforts to push the boundaries of visual computing in gaming,” Sony states. “Their work will include applying machine learning to enhance gameplay aesthetics, refine rendering techniques, and offer players unprecedented visual fidelity.”
Machine learning has become a focal point for Sony as it strives to boost graphical performance on the PlayStation 5 and upcoming hardware. The PlayStation 5 Pro features a new GPU, rapid storage, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a custom AI upscaling technology that enables the console to run games at lower resolutions while upscaling to 4K. Recently, the company found even greater performance capabilities in the Pro through an enhanced version of PSSR released in March. Furthermore, in partnership with AMD, Sony is developing Project Amethyst, a collaborative initiative aimed at enhancing ray tracing and upscaling for future console releases.
