Sony showed immersive gaming in The Last of Us: the company figured out how to put the gamer inside the game

Sony demonstrated at CES 2025 a structure that provides complete immersion in a computer game – from the image to the smells that are supplied to the room. The legendary The Last of Us was chosen as an example.

Image Source: Playstation.com

The Sony project is called Future Immersive Entertainment. It is unlikely that the Japanese manufacturer intends to establish mass production of such systems in the foreseeable future – this is rather a conceptual project that demonstrates one of the possible directions for the development of the gaming industry. Sony engineers were able to take existing ideas—perimeter screens, scent synthesizers—and reimagine them using cutting-edge technology.

The Future Immersive Entertainment system is a giant cube of LED panels that surrounds the player inside. As he explores the game world, the system bombards him with “sound, haptics, smells and atmospheric effects” – all of which contribute to immersion in the gameplay. The player is also presented with a set of physical tools that interact with the world on the screen. In addition to various weapons, this is, for example, a flashlight that illuminates only that fragment of the game space at which it is aimed.