Sony have jumped into the VR headset arena with both feet, announcing their VR headset, dubbed Project Morpheus. There were some fascinating details to the approach they took during development and their thoughts on what helps to immerse a player in the virtual worlds.
There were also a bunch of technical details about the developer hit and design of the device, which we’ve summed for you:
- The current dev kit has a 5″ 1080p LCD display (960×1080 per eye) with 90 degree field of view. This is not final.
- Head tracking runs at 1000Hz within a 3 meter volume and through 360 degrees, facilitated by the PlayStation Camera and LED lights alongside an accelerometer and gyroscope.
- The PS Camera can track both your head and any DS4 or PS Move controllers at the same time.
- It is wired, using HDMI and USB to connect to the PS4, though they’re looking at wireless solutions.
- The social screen feature allows the game image to be shared on an external TV, so that others can witness and join in.
- The unique design sits higher on your head, in such a way that the display itself doesn’t put pressure on your nose and allows air to circulate.
- It will accomodate those who wear glasses.
- The prototype allows for you to use your own headphones, which you can plug into the headset, for it to process the 3D audio.
The Von Braun
Beware the Bean Counters (Accountants).Anyone recal inital Kinect Specs?……
Bean counters came in said, hey, how about you remove that onboard CPU, let the 360 handle it.Good , now that camera, quite High Res, is’nt it, tell you what, lets put in a lower resolution camera…there, that looks just as nice, now lets not get too carried away reducing things, lets keep the original retail price (and they did and no-one really lived happily ever after) :-).
This like any potential hardware will be based around the power-to-price ratio, it’ll need to be powerful enough to do the job, but cheap enough to reach mass-market and also i guess they’ll want to make profit on hardware if possible.
Corners thus will be cut, dunno if it’ll be build quality (Super Slim PS3 anyone?) or lower tech specs or fewer ports (all those lovely HDMI ports, USB ports started dropping off original PS3 shown and on later models after launch) or all 3, but mark my words, the bean counters will go over it with a fine tooth comb.
MrYd
Is that really a bad thing? They need to get the price down to something reasonable.
There’s no limit to the number features or extra power you can add to things. They could increase the resolution from that split 1080p and have 4k for each eye. Or higher. And have surround sound built into it. And stuff lots of extra processing power in to take the load off the PS4. And make it out of something shiny and indestructible.
Or they could make it at a price where people will actually buy the thing.
And yes, in 10 years time, all those extra features will be cheap enough to put in. But for now (or whenever it gets released), that’s just not possible. Or it is, but nobody would ever buy it.
It’s always a 3 way fight between the money people that want to make as much money as possible, the engineers that want to add as many cool features as they can, and the customers that have to justify the cost of buying one.
It’s not really a case of cutting corners. It’s more a case of being realistic about being able to sell the product.
All those USB ports on the original PS3 were kind of unnecessary. They might have been nice to have, but nobody really needed them, and they just added to the cost, which was already far too high to start with.
In this case, some serious battles are going to have to be thought between the engineers and the people with the money. Otherwise, it’ll be far too expensive. As it is, I can’t see it being cheap any time soon. Which is why I suspect it’s a very early announcement and we’re still 18-24 months away from getting our hands on the final product.
If they hadn’t launched the PS4 too early, they could have announced this much later and released it sooner. As lovely as the PS4 is, it really should have waited until later this year, and then a year from now they could say “We’ve got this cool thing that makes you look like A Twat From the Future, available this September for a quite reasonable price”
The Von Braun
At the moment, it’s just a ‘thing’ not good or bad.The original Xbox had it’s specs lowered and turned out just fine, yet Kinect did suffer from hardware downgrading.As fellow poster has already pointed out, as the current specs stand, it does’nt even match the Jaguar VR headset in 1 key area, degrees of movement ( 90 as opposed to 120 ) so i guess that’s 1 area of concern already.
This could be little more than Sony ‘testing the waters’ see how customer reacts to Home VR, after all 3D TV’s were once seen as the future, likes of E.A invested a lot into this aspect in games, dropped it quick enough when they were’nt making a good enough return off it, invested in other areas of gaming where they could make money.
If PS4 is not quite capable of running vanilla games in 1080P/60 FPS for the more graphically intense games, i wonder how complex PS4 VR games would be? or indeed how complex they needed to be?.
Basically, it’d be good to know what ustomers expect in terms of visuals and how much they deem is aceptable to pay for the device and then what Sony deliver based on those 2 factors.
Scythegpd
Great, another product that has a lot of potential that Sony will release and then leave to die due to lack of support. See PSEye and move as examples.
This also retains the 3D issue of having to wear something, which is generally shit. I’ll wait until holographic displays thanks. Especially where Sony and their accessories are involved, they’ll need to pump in a lot of support before I’d even think about this or you’ll end up with more white elephant to junk gathering dust