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By 19 March 2014 | Categories: news

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If choosing the red pill meant staying with what it has known to date, while popping the blue one meant embracing virtual reality, then Sony just opted for the latter path, as the company revealed Project Morpheus, its plan for a virtual reality headset for the PS4.

While the headset, which debuted at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, is still in its prototype form, its specifications look decent enough. So far, its boasts a 5” LCD screen with a 1920 x 1080 resolution, accelerometer and gyroscope, along with HDMI and USB inputs.

For the uninitiated, virtual reality at large and Sony’s offering in particular enable developers to create experiences that deliver a sense of presence - where players feel as though they are physically inside the virtual world of a game. Sony explained that presence is “like a window into another world that heightens the emotions gamers experience as they play.”

Virtual reality kung fu

To this end, Project Morpheus includes inertial sensors built into the head mount unit, which works with the PlayStation Camera to accurately track head orientation and movement. This means that as the player’s head rotates, the image of the virtual world rotates naturally and intuitively in real-time along with them.

Furthermore, in supporting games, the player will be able to use a PS Move motion controller as an object, such as a sword. According to Sony, Project Morpheus will reproduce the player’s hands and sword within the game so the player feels like they are physically fighting off enemies with their sword in the virtual world.

Another point in Project Morpheus’ favour is how the technology handles sound. Apparently, players will not only hear sounds behind, before or on either side of them, but stereoscopic sounds appearing to come from below or above them as well. This could be used, for example, to generate the impression of someone climbing up the stairs beneath them, or of a helicopter flying overhead.

There is no spoon

“We view innovation as an opportunity to build on our mission to push the boundaries of play,” commented Shuhei Yoshida, president of SCE Worldwide Studios. “Project Morpheus is the latest example of innovation from SCE, and we’re looking forward to its continued development and the games that will be created as development kits get into the hands of content creators,” he enthused.

Sony is far from the only one with a vision of players plugging into and immersing themselves in virtual reality content. Indeed, Oculus Rift has been garnering a fair share of interest for quite some time, while Technical Illusions has its own plans for creating immersive, 3-dimensional experiences.

“I cannot tell you, I can only show you”

As with so many new innovations, questions do remain for the technology though, both from a user and a manufacturer perspective. These include whether players at large will adopt the trend en-masse, whether virtual reality could in fact usher in a new era of gaming, and at what point virtual reality worlds will become self aware, self sustaining and start treating their players like batteries.

For Sony and other manufacturers, its cloying question is not just whether virtual reality will become the next big thing, but even if they do, which provider of the technology will end up being The One?

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