PlayStation Patents Technology That Detects Users By How They Hold Their Controller

Manually logging onto your PlayStation accounts may soon become a thing of the past after a newly approved PlayStation patent will supposedly detect your identity by how you hold your controller.

Sony Interactive Entertainment’s patent for a “method of authentication” was filed in February and approved last week, reports Segment Next.

Video Games Chronicle notes that it describes a system that uses sensors (such as a gyroscope or an accelerometer) to determine the identity of specific users by how they hold their controller, thus automatically logging them in or out of their profiles when they use it.

The patent says that this technology would remove the need for users to manually log in to their accounts and would even go so far as to properly attribute score and trophies to the correct user when two or more players are sharing a single controller.

Telemetry data would be used to identify the user and attribute that data accordingly to their user profiles. In a matter of 60 seconds, certain characteristics like the vertical position that the user typically holds the controller or its orientation (such as holding one side of the controller slightly higher than the other) can then be identified.

Once the data passes the system’s confidence test, a prompt would then appear to allow users to affirm or deny that the detected user profile is theirs.

The patent indicates that the technology could work with a number of devices including a DualShock controller, Move, and PSVR headset. It is not yet clear, however, if this technology will be present in the PlayStation 5.

That is curious considering how heavily Sony has been promoting the features of its DualSense controller in marketing the PS5.

In its most recent commercial, Sony focuses on the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers of the DualSense controller while welcoming viewers to “a new world of immersion.” The DualSense is supposed to be an improvement of the previous DualShock controllers that PlayStation users have grown accustomed to for years.

The high bandwidth SSD of the PlayStation 5 is also supposed to significantly reduce load times for games while the completely revamped interface is promoted to allow players to boot directly into multiplayer games and display joinable online activities in real-time.