Sony acquires 3D animation company Beyond Sports to offer a complete sports Metaverse experience

Entertainment and electronics giant Sony has just finalized the acquisition of Beyond Sports, a company that specializes in using real-world data to produce 3D animations. With this purchase, the company would now be able to offer a complete metaverse experience for sports games, with technologies from other companies already in its portfolio.

Sony’s purchase of Beyond Sports brings it closer to the sports metaverse

Sony is now making a foray into the world of the sports metaverse. The company recently completed the acquisition of Beyond Sports, a 3D imaging and animation company that has technology to transform real-world information from a sports game into a metaverse representation. The figures of the acquisition were not published, but they would amount to $ 70 million, according to the following sources Nikkei estimates.

The purchase, along with technology from Hawk-Eye Innovations – another company owned by the conglomerate – will allow the company to produce real-time content related to basketball, baseball, tennis and soccer games. Hawk-Eye Innovations, which was acquired in 2011, produces technology that tracks the position of the ball at all times, and has been used by organizations such as the National Football League (NFL) and the National Hockey League (NHL).

The combination of these two technologies could allow Sony to create an accurate digital representation of a field or court, with realistic ball and player movement.

The virtual sports market

Another Sony-owned company could fill the distribution gap to bring these experiences to the public. Pulselive, a company that runs several sports team and organization sites, could include these meta-versions on these sites, creating a new revenue stream and attempting to popularize this new approach to sports.

Sony may also be able to offer metaverse games using its Playstation line of consoles as a distribution device. The company is developing a virtual reality (VR) headset exclusively for its console, dubbed Playstation VR 2, confirmed for release in February 2023, which could be used to enjoy these metaverse experiences in an immersive manner.

Sony has already flirted with metaverse and non-fungible token (NFT) technology, filing a series of patents to use NFTs as a way to track the history and ownership of game assets. Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida has also said: previously that Sony’s “top priority is to create a metaverse around entertainment,” using all the tools the brand has to do so.