Sony will be another company hopping onto the metaverse bandwagon with some big plans to embrace the tech.
During a corporate strategy meeting with Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida, the company announced their plans for metaverse goals. These aspects will involve most of what Sony as a whole is known for with gaming, music, sports, movies, and televisions shows.
A major way Sony is promoting their metaverse ambitions is using the term “kando” to describe the emerging platform and technology.
They don’t define what they mean when saying it in their presentation slides, but “kando” in Japanese means sensitivity, which can relate to emotions.
Choice quotes from the presentation made by Kenichiro Yoshia are shown below:
The Metaverse is at the same time a social space and a live network space where games, music, movies, and anime intersect and expand…
One example is the partnership with Manchester City Football Club. The stadium is an important space for the sports community. By reproducing the stadium itself and the athletes in a network space, we are creating an experience where users can enjoy playing without restrictions on location…
When it comes to live experiences that share time and space, music immediately comes to mind. Sony Music artists have already performed many live performances in game spaces…
Given some of the statements made by their the Sony CEO, the company appears to have quite some lofty goals when it comes to how they will tackle the metaverse. Their involvement with it is not new.
Last month, it was announced that Sony had invested $2 billion to Epic Games’ plans on advancing their vision to build the metaverse. Epic Games themselves are no strangers to the concept through concerts they have performed with pop stars like Ariana Grande in Fortnite.
It is interesting to note their references to sporting events. The idea seems to be a manner where users would be able to get the live experience of watching a sports match as if they were there without physically being at the stadium/arena.
Last thing to note would be them mentioning anime as being a part of their metaverse plans. Sony did bring up their acquisition of Crunchyroll which led to the merger between that and Funimation, which Sony also owns. They don’t further into detail on what anime would offer in the metaverse, so their plans are still unknown on that matter.
