As expected and rumored for quite some time, Sony has now officially announced its Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset made for Playstation 4. Sony showcased the prototype at Game Developers Conference 2014 running EVE Valkyrie and Thief game.
While still being in its prototype phase and, as Sony was so keen to note, "by no means final", we now at least have a general idea on what Sony is aiming at with its own virtual reality headset. Based on a 1920x1080 (960x1080 per eye) 5-inch LCD display with 90 degree field of view and equipped with accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, positional head tracking, with 3 meter volume with full 360-dgree tracking which works with Playstation Camera as well as "true spatial audio" via binaural audio.
While the current developer kit is wired, we are quite sure that the final version will most likely be wireless. The dev kit has quite a long wire and also features a breakout box, something we have seen on the original Oculus Rift dev kit. It uses HDMI and USB for connection and actually looks quite cool.
During GDC 2014, Sony had a total of four demos running on the Project Morpheus, including EVE: Valkyrie, Thief as well as two demos made specifically to show what Project Morpheus can actually do.
In any case, Sony's Project Morpheus is quite interesting and Oculus just got some serious competition as Sony is definitely pushing hard for virtual reality. Unfortunately, Sony is still not ready to talk about the price or the launch date but considering that running prototype is at GDC 2014 and that dev kit should be ready for developers quite soon we guess we will not wait long for it.
Source:
Playstation.com, Engadget.com.