Sony has shown a wild appearance, Star-Trek-holodeck-like technology that, if it works as advertised, allows people to step into the world the last of us and get up close and personal with the franchise's grotesque spore zombies. This new technology even lets you uh…smell them.
At CES 2025, which is happening right now, Sony appeared what he calls the “Future Immersive Entertainment Concept”. The idea is to use a large selection of high-end TVs to create a room that people can walk into and be surrounded by different environments from movies and games.
Here is a video from Sony showing the tech and a proof of concept version of it in use Finally Us game assets.
The concept is similar to Volume ILM– around people with video footage of a CG environment – but Sony's concept is about interactivity and making things more immersive, not making a virtual set for a TV show or movie. And that means, according to Sony, that a future version of this technology will allow people to smell the worlds they enter. One day, you'll be able to pay $50 to Sony for the privilege of walking around a large room full of 8K monitors and smelling Clicker's moldy face and dirty clothes. Just an amazing future.
Before you go too happy to smell the last of us or explore the world of Ghostbusters through Sony's Holodeck-like technology, keep in mind that this whole concept is still years away from actual production.
However, I could see a future where Sony combines a more advanced version of this video room idea with something like The Disney Infinity Floor to create a hyper-realistic haunted house or digital target range featuring famous characters and guns from games made by PlayStation.
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