Virtual Reality for PS4

Morpheus: Virtual Reality for Playstation 4

Sony is bringing virtual reality to the PS4 via its Project Morpheus headset.

It’s just so typical. You wait many years for a consumer-friendly virtual reality headset then two come along at once. This is the old joke currently facing VR fanatics, where Sony is now offering hands-on time with its newly announced Project Morpheus headset for PS4 – just as indie Tech Company Oculus is showing off the revised dev kit for its long-awaited alternative, the Oculus Rift.

Sony certainly hasn’t gone into this lightly, or indeed quickly. The technology behind Project Morpheus has been in development for three years, under the watchful eye of R&D chief Richard Marks, who oversaw the development of the groundbreaking Eye Toy peripheral. At the GDC unveiling event on Tuesday, president of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida revealed that the team had been working with a makeshift HMD featuring two Move controllers duct-taped to it, and the Santa Monica studio has a God of War demo running on the tech in 2011.

So what do the developers make of it.

“We think this could be as revolutionary to console gaming as the Wii was,” says Si Stratton of Cardiff-based studio Mr Dog, which is working on both virtual reality games and movies. “Morpheus will inspire innovation in gaming – we’ve heard of a company that has already developed a game where you can move around without a controller – something that’s relatively easy on in VR as you can tell where the player is looking.

But there are other concerns.

The Rift audience is an enthusiastic one; so far the device has flourished through a global network of early adopters who are willing to overlook some of the fundamental difficulties – such as nausea. “Ultimately, Sony’s audience is a lot more mainstream than the Oculus Rift’s,” says Stratton. ”It will live and die on whether they’ve solved the motion sickness issue when playing for long periods. No one wants to come home from work, plug in their PS4 and feel ill.”

“There is still no exact date (or price) of when ‘Morpheus’ is going to be released but Yoshida stated that it will not happen in 2014 as first thought.

Sources: Keith Stuart (The Guardian) & Gamespot.com