Is this the PlayStation 5 development kit? Or is it a spaceship?

If you were shown the following image and asked what kind of product you think it is, what would you say? In our case, we would have opted for some type of computer for gamers with the seal of Alienware, or, where appropriate, a short-range projector of the same brand. But you know what? This is a design published in a patent application from Sony Interactive Entertainment, and that could give us a very, very interesting clue: PlayStation 5.

registration of industrial design

The patent application has appeared in the National Institute of Industrial Property of Brazil, place where the industrial patent for the design of the device that you can see below was applied for on May 28. Unfortunately, the registry does not mention any kind of description of the device, so we can only keep the name “electronic device”.

Sony's authority leaves no doubt, as the name of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. appears as representative of the patent. However, the most interesting detail is found in the name of the designer, since the person in charge of designing the product is none other than Yusuhiro Ootori. If you don't know who it is, all you have to do is take a look at the video that Wired published in 2013, where they did a complete breakdown of the then new PlayStation 4. The person in charge of doing the breakdown? He engineering department manager from Sony Comuter Entertainment. And yes, we are talking about Yusuhiro Ootori again.

With this track, doubts about whether we are dealing with a development kit or not seem to dissipate. Also, if we take a look at the designs, we can see a disk slot on the front, as well as numerous unidentified connections and more than one hole that could mean status LEDs (very common in this type of units).

What is a development kit?

The development kits They are provided to developers by console manufacturers so that they can carry out testing and testing work during game creation. This way they will be able to see the performance first hand on a platform similar to the one that will arrive in stores as a final product, although its design is nothing like the one that users finally receive.

We could say that it is more similar to a computer than a console, but at the level of performance it will offer the same as the final model to be able to put yourself in the user's shoes when the game reaches your console. If we take a look at previous versions of development kits (above in the image of the PS4), we can see how the chassis had large ventilation openings and the form factor was rough and bulky, nothing to do with the final designs of the consoles.

Therefore, we could almost say that the images that accompany the patent correspond to the design of the development kit of PlayStation 5, something that we can only confirm if the brand publishes something about it or some other developer gets confused with some other involuntary photo.