Sony today unveiled a new version of their PS4 virtual reality headset, code-named Project Morpheus, and though it’s still not final (or ready to be sold), they’re already touting how much better it is than the one they showed off last year.
Morpheus will ship in the first half of 2016, Sony said this afternoon at a GDC presentation in San Francisco. No word on price yet.
This new unit’s got an OLED display with 1920×1080 resolution, Sony says. It will offer framerate options of 60fps and 120fps. The screen is 5.7 inches, with 360-degree tracking and what Sony says is super low latency — less than half of what the first version had.
You can wear glasses with this new version of Morpheus, which is designed as a single band that goes around your head. You can slide the headset away without taking it off entirely, in case you need to see someone or take a drink or something.
At their GDC presentation today, Sony showed off a few new demos for the VR headset, like London Heist, which looks something like a first-person shooter:
And then there’s Bedroom Robots, a demo about… bedroom robots.
Magic Controller lets you see your controller as you play around with VR:
And finally, there’s an updated version of last year’s shark demo, The Deep, now with More Sea Life™.
Sony says they will have more details on Morpheus this coming E3 “and beyond.”
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.
Comments
21 responses to “Sony’s PS4 Virtual Reality Headset Is Coming Next Year”
Is that 1920×1080 per eye?
Very unlikely, 960 x 1080 per eye is the norm.
No way. That’s a 1080p panel. Could you image a PS4 trying to drive a dual 1080p panel at 120FPS??? That would actually be the same as trying to drive a game at 4K@60FPS, impossible on current gen systems.
Well, unless you like Quake III.
Wouldn’t have to drive it at native 1080P, it could be a scaled display, with the scaling in the headset, but @ 1080P per eye it would reduce the ‘screen door’ effect, even if it was a scaled up 720P image.
True, Sony does have a very good scaling engine. But It would really be better to run native 1080p (or even higher and scale down) but the frame rate is what really matters here.
Especially interesting this generation with the improved resolution scaling using temporal AA etc to blend frames together.
The ‘screen door’ effect would be present even at the full 1080p resolution. Reducing that further then scaling it up would result in a pretty poor image quality. It’s a difficult hurdle to pass, one I don’t think we’ll truly overcome during this generation of VR.
Is the fps attainable due to smaller screen size? I’ve seen people talk about how at low/variable frame rates the VR headsets make people sick but with most next gen games struggling to hit 60fps consistently will that be an issue?
Yep! In VR you’re better off optimising for fps at the cost of some graphical power.
so does that mean VR mode will lower the graphics of games that are also non VR or is it the small screen meaning you can get higher fps
It really depends on the devs tbh. If VR gets thrown in as an afterthought they might just go the horrible fps route, but for a decent VR experience they’d need to make trade offs. I doubt they’d lower the resolution as people have already commented that Oculus’ lower resolution took them out of it. I expect they’d just reduce ground clutter, bloom, tessellation and other frills that the game doesn’t absolutely need.
Funnily enough since VR tends to work a lot better in cockpit type games, its very easy to dial down the environmental/model details since you’re never right up against them.
you are still rendering the exact same amount of pixels. my guess is if they plan on mainstream games being compatible, we may get some graphics options like in the last of us. personally i find lighting, shadows, and texture filtering to be the main FPS killers
Definitely. I don’t think we will be seeing graphic showcases like The Order running natively in 3D without a substantial visual reduction. The power simply isn’t there to render visuals like that once per eye in real-time to provide a true stereoscopic effect.
Not really, it just means you have less objects on screen at once.
For example, I would be confident that the PS4 could deliver PS3 visuals at 120fps easily, so if you had games that looked like that kind of quality, then you can hit the frame rates.
VR is a different experience, so the games could be optimised for frame rates, less NPCs, more claustrophobic arenas (which suits the feel anyway) = less polygons to push. You could make some great experiences without requiring massive poly counts, but they would be different to standard gaming experiences, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I wonder how prominent the ‘screen door’ effect will be? The Oculus Rift & Gear VR use QHD screens and the pixel density still isn’t high enough for a lot of people. I also wonder how well the PlayStation will be able to render games in 3D at the headset’s native resolution. Keeping a consistently high frame rate is of upmost importance.
Awesome.. another reason for me to buy a PS4.. and if its released sometime next year, it will be the perfect timing as I was already considering waiting till then before upgrading from PS3.
That angle looks like they attached a hair dryer to the top.
With all the support they’ve been giving the camera and their long history of ensuring that add-on devices are adopted into core development of a wide range of games I’m sure they won’t abandon this the second they realise it won’t get them Wii-like sales.
I agree and I use the camera all the time. Its really good at stopping paper from being blown off my desk.
With PSMove and it’s associated peripherals, they’ve already got input sorted. I’d be perfectly happy with dedicated VR games (or, even, VR optimized versions of games) with scaled back graphics if they can keep the frame rate up and the input works properly.
In all honesty, I don’t much care about the graphics being better. Even if a dedicated VR game “only” looked as good as Uncharted 2, I’d be happy. So long as the experience is worthwhile and the inputs and control scheme is convincing, I don’t really care about having fancy effects or higher poly counts.
The PS4 could handle better resolutions, just keep in mind you won’t be playing most standard games for this device.
The games will be customized/optimized thus their quality/detail will be set to allow for 60+ fps gameplay, this is a good thing as it forces developers to be a little more realistic with their shaders/special effects instead of just puking it all over the screen for no reason!
The issue I have with this device is 1) screen door, 2) 90 degree angle. The Oculus and other devices are 100-110 degree angle