Sony revealed the prototype for the PlayStation 4’s virtual reality headset today, with Sony president Shuhei Yoshida saying, “Nothing delivers a feeling of immersion better than VR. VR has been a dream of many gamers since the computer was invented. Many of us at PlayStation have dreamed of VR and what it could mean to the gaming community.”
More than anything else in gaming this past few years, this feels like a dispatch from the future.
The headset, codenamed Project Morpheus, will be exclusive for the PlayStation 4, and it promises to provide the most immersive gaming experience ever. Think: a 1080p LCD screen, a 90-degree field of view, and integration with the PS Move for motion control. It’s currently limited by a 5-meter cable, but Sony hopes to make it wireless.
The virtual reality set was announced at the Game Developers Conference in an event that featured a genius by the name of Richard Marks, who developed EyeToy and PS Move. Marks said he had been working on a project with NASA to create a virtual reality Mars—I’m not joking—and told the audience, “VR is going to be pervasive, and what I mean by that is it’s going to be used for all sorts of things you might not think it would be used for.”
Don’t look for it anytime this year. Marks said the technology still needs to better itself in sight, sound, tracking, control, ease of use, and content, which sounds like a lot—but this announcement in and of itself was significant. This is the first time a major game developer has hopped on board the VR express, and Sony says it plans to make Project Morpheus available to developers soon.
Until then, here it is in action, via Kotaku: