The best thing about CES is that technology companies spare no expense or resources to surprise us with each announcement. Sony has achieved this with the Afeela, their car manufactured in collaboration with Honda that can be driven with a remote control. Another one, like Xiaomi, joins the world of mobility.
The Sony press conference on the eve of CES 2024 served to showcase the synergies between its different media, gaming, and entertainment brands.
Izumi Kawanishi, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sony Honda Mobility, reintroduced the electric car Afeela by driving it on stage with a PlayStation 5 DualSense controller.
What do we know about Sony’s electric car?
You probably won’t be able to park your Sony EV with your PS5 controller when the brand starts manufacturing Afeela. Kawanishi was quick to point out that it was just a technical demonstration.
This is the third time the electric car is presented at CES and it looks almost the same as the last time we saw it, so it makes sense that a flashy presentation was needed to catch our attention.
However, Sony and Honda executives provided more details about the development of Afeela and now we know more about the entertainment and safety technologies that the joint venture of the Japanese companies will bring to the road.
It turns out that Afeela has more in common with your PS5 than the controller. To begin with, it uses Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5.3 to power the three-dimensional graphics and visual effects that fill the huge widescreen dashboard.
Drivers and passengers will be able to enjoy detailed 3D maps, virtual spaces, and augmented reality views of the world surrounding the Afeela, to which metadata from the Internet can be overlaid. Users will also have access to multimedia content from Sony’s various catalogs of television shows, movies, and games to keep passengers entertained.
Unreal Engine is also used to render the simulated environments used to train Afeela’s multi-camera driver assistance systems.
The highly realistic graphics of UE5 are also used to enhance safety. The highly realistic simulated environments of the game engine allow for greater accuracy when training visual models and processing neural networks that power the driver assistance features of the EV.
Sony Honda Mobility also announced a new partnership with Microsoft to use the Azure AI cloud computing technology from the software giant in the development of Afeela.
