Sony Patent-y things.
A patent that may be related to work on '3D Audio'.
METHOD FOR ACOUSTICALLY RENDERING THE SIZE OF SOUND A SOURCE
The opening summary has a good, well, summary of surround sound vs what might be called '3D Audio', and the weaknesses in surround sound that these techniques try to address. People seem to ask sometimes what the difference is, so that summary might be a reasonable primer on it.
More specifically this patent seems to be two techniques for making a sound seem to come from a specific location when it reaches your ear - point sound source simulation and a spherical harmonics representation ('ambisonics'). The latter being 'better' but having much higher computational cost, and a narrower range in which its effective. The application describes a system that swaps between the two representations depending on the distance between the user and the sound source and/or the size of the sound source. Ambisonics is apparently a lot better for representing large sound sources.
This patent may relate to what Mark Cerny described as part of the new PS5 UI:
GAME APPLICATION LAUNCH SYSTEM AND METHOD
It basically talks about a metadata system for describing different modes in a game, some of which are standardised and have a common data layout between different games that the OS handles, and some of which may be proprietary to one game and handled by the game engine. The shortcuts bypass the game menu to simply drop the user into the game as configured by the metadata. Or, if a menu is absolutely necessary for a particular mode, it seems there's a possibility of a lightweight menu being interactable immediately through the shortcut, rather than having to wait for an in-engine menu. Basically the user can 'explore' the game through these shortcuts before actually committing to launching the game, and then once they do, the the game can be launched knowing what the user wants to do and bypassing the games own menu and config screens. It also talks about the possibility of preloading certain components of a game when the user starts interacting with these OS-level shortcuts, to expedite loading once the user actually launches the game.