In the modern day, social elements have become very important when it comes video games and video game consoles. Big companies like Sony Interactive Entertainment and Microsoft are always trying to to improve the social experiences for players with different updates on the respective consoles.
With the release of PS5 and Xbox Series, these social updates are becoming more common. Naturally, companies would also want to secure (by filing different patents) their concepts of different social systems so that they cannot be used by others.
Sony has recently been granted a similar patent that basically describes different ways to manage notifications on user GUI/Display.
Techniques for managing notifications are described. In an example, a computing device presents content in an application window based on an execution of an application. Notification data is received by a computing device. Based on a context associated with the computing device, such as whether the application windows is the foreground and whether the notification data is associated with the application or such as the operational mode of the computing device, a determination is made whether or present a corresponding notification in-context within the application window of in a pop-up window. Otherwise, the notification is added to a notification list and can be summarized in a notification summary.
As you can see from the images (more can be found here), although there is nothing revolutionary or ground-breaking, these small quality of life improvements can definitely improve the user experience which is very important for companies these days.
With PS5 being relatively new, we can expect these new GUI concepts making their way to Sony’s latest console. However, just like many other patents, this could also never see the light of the day as companies file a lot of patents and only a handful of them actually are used for real products.