Sony, Manchester City building a metaverse

Tech giant Sony has shown a brief look of the metaverse experience it is building with the football club Manchester City at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023.

Sony and Manchester City are calling this experience a “proof of concept” (PoC), which will allow players to participate in activities at a virtual version of the team’s Etihad Stadium with their own custom avatars, reports The Verge.

In an official video posted by ‘Sony-Global’, virtual avatars are running around the stadium and field, dancing and celebrating together.

Avatars, 3D images and “other expressions unique to the metaverse” will allow players to communicate “in a new way,” Nami Iwamoto, a senior product planner at Sony, said during the tech giant’s CES 2023 keynote.

Another video demonstrated how Sony used “just seven sensors” to record footage and volumetric data of Manchester City players in order to digitally recreate them in this metaverse space.

According to a tech giant’s spokesperson Yo Kikuchi, the “app” will be released this year, but it is still unclear if the avatar creation, virtual stadium and highlights will all be included in that application.

The partnership was first announced in November 2021. At the time, both Sony and Manchester City used the term “metaverse” and described the effort as a PoC, the report said.