Get the newsletter
Sony · AR / VR · Filed Aug 21, 2025 · USPTO published Jun 18, 2026 · Jun 18 release

Sony Patents Sound That Shifts Based on Where Your Virtual Character Stands

In most multiplayer games, your teammate sounds the same whether their character is standing next to you or across the map. Sony wants to fix that by making voices shift — in volume, direction, and distance — based on exactly where avatars are standing relative to each other.

By · Updated · 3 min read

Sony Patent: Spatial Audio Based on Avatar Position in VR, figure from US 2026/0166431 A1
Figure from the official USPTO publication.
Publication number
US 2026/0166431 A1(US20260166431A1)
Applicant
Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.
Filed · Published
Aug 21, 2025 · Jun 18, 2026
Inventors
Yumi Ueda, Naoki Kudo, Airi Takeuchi
Status when we published
Waiting for an examiner
Document
11 claims
US classification
463/35
Parent application
National Stage Entry of PCT/JP2023/010683 (filed Mar 17, 2023)(PCTJP2023010683)

How Sony ties voice chat to avatar position in VR

Imagine you're in a virtual world with friends and one of them walks up behind your character to whisper something. Right now, most games play everyone's voice at the same flat volume no matter where they are. Sony's patent describes a system that changes how a player's voice sounds based on where their in-game character is standing compared to yours.

If their avatar is far away, their voice should sound distant. If they're off to your left, it should come from the left. The system constantly reads each character's position in the virtual space and reshapes the audio in real time to match.

This is essentially spatial audio for voice chat — the same idea behind headphones that make a movie's sound feel 3D, applied to the people you're actually playing with. It sounds like a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that makes a virtual world feel real rather than just visual.

How the system tracks positions and reshapes audio

The patent describes a device with four key components working together:

  • First acquisition section — continuously reads the position of both the local player's character and the other player's character inside the virtual space.
  • Second acquisition section — captures the incoming voice or sound data from the other user (the second player's microphone feed).
  • Sound processing section — takes that voice data and modifies it based on the relative positional relationship between the two avatars. This is the core step: if the avatars are 50 virtual meters apart, the audio is processed to sound distant; if one avatar is to the right of the other, the audio is panned accordingly.
  • Sound output section — delivers the processed audio to the first user's headphones or speakers.

The underlying idea is sometimes called spatialized or positional audio — audio rendering that simulates how sound behaves in physical space. Distance, direction, and occlusion (being blocked by objects) are all factors that can be fed into this kind of processing pipeline. The patent focuses specifically on tying this to character positions in a virtual environment rather than to a fixed speaker setup.

What this means for multiplayer VR and PlayStation games

Sony Interactive Entertainment makes the PlayStation consoles and the PlayStation VR2 headset, so a patent like this fits neatly into their push to make virtual reality feel more immersive. Spatial audio has been a selling point for Sony's hardware for years — the PS5 ships with a custom Tempest 3D audio engine. Extending that to live voice chat between players, driven by avatar positions, would be a natural next step.

For you as a player, the practical effect is that multiplayer spaces — whether a VR social app, a co-op shooter, or an online party game — could feel dramatically more convincing. Conversations would carry a sense of physical presence that flat voice chat simply doesn't provide.

Source: US 2026/0166431 A1 at the USPTO (PDF). Full patent text and figures are in the official publication.

Get our take in your Top Stories

Liked this breakdown? Add Patentlyze as a preferred source on Google, and our plain-English take shows up more often in your Top Stories the next time Sony patent news breaks.

Add Patentlyze on Google One click.
There are more where this came from

We read every patent application Big Tech publishes and send you the ones worth knowing. Plain English, free, every week.

More from Sony

All 707 Sony patents →

More in AR / VR

All 690 AR / VR patents →