Despite their continued existence and the obvious cool factor, they haven't become as common as our speculative fiction led us to believe they would have been by now. There are lots of possible reasons, including their low resolution, tendency to cause simulation sickness and the prohibitive cost of the better models.
But conditions have changed. Graphics processing, motion tracking and display technologies, among other things, have all improved vastly since the inception of VR, and everything has gotten smaller and cheaper. We now have far more powerful processors, a myriad of sensors and small high-resolution displays that are bringing consumer VR into the realm of possibility. The release, to much fanfare, of the Oculus Rift VR headset development kit in 2013 has made relatively inexpensive home models seem likely in the near future.
Now a major company is jumping into the VR arena. Sony Computer Entertainment has developed a working VR headset, codenamed Project Morpheus, specifically for the PlayStation 4 gaming system. It's in prototype phase as of this writing, so the specifications, functionality and the name may change once the consumer model is finally out, but it will be no less cool.
History of Project Morpheus
A team called Grover was formed from members of the Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) Hardware group, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) R&D and Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios to work on a prototype, and it has gone through several iterations. First, they duct taped PS Move controllers to a HEADPLAY Personal Cinema System, a third-party headset for viewing movies, games and other media. Then in 2011, they attached PS Move components to a higher-resolution Sony HMZ viewer. In 2012, they produced a demo video of a VR prototype that consisted of an HMZ headset with one attached Move and another Move controller in the user's hand for more control. It had a much narrower field of view than their ultimate goal, but it worked for demonstration purposes.
More than three years of experimentation have finally yielded Project Morpheus, a prototype that was unveiled at the March 2014 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco by Shuhei Yoshida (President - SCE Worldwide Studios), Richard Marks (Senior Director of Magic Labs - SCEA R&D) and Anton Mikhailov (Senior Software Engineer - SCEA R&D).
The device's current name comes from Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, for the dreamlike experience the headset is supposed to evoke. Despite not being ready for market, Project Morpheus has a lot of cool components and capabilities. Read on to find out what technical details we know as of mid-2014.
Technical Specs
The current Project Morpheus prototype is a sleek black and white wearable VR headset. It has a 5-inch (12.7-centimeter) LCD display with 1920 by 1080 pixel (960 by 1080 per eye) resolution, which users will view through special lenses. In order to mimic 3D binocular vision, each eye will see a slightly different rendering of an image at a different angle.The device provides a 90-degree horizontal field of view for people wearing glasses -- possibly more for others. They have built 15mm to 25mm of eye relief into the headset. It also allows for a wide range of interpupillary distance (IPD).
Several components and peripherals will work together to handle positional tracking and motion control for Project Morpheus. The headset incorporates inertial sensors (gyroscopes and accelerometers) to track head motion and orientation. An external PlayStation Camera (an optional peripheral for PS4 that will be required to use Project Morpheus) will track LEDs all around the device, even on the back of the headset, to keep tabs on the user's position. The device will also work with existing PS Dualshock 4 and PS Move controllers so that PlayStation 4 can track your hands as well as your head. The system allows for six degrees of freedom, has a 3-meter working volume and tracks the position and orientation of the headset with a refresh rate of 1000 Hz.
Project Morpheus also incorporates 3D audio technology that delivers omnidirectional sound by simulating up to 60 virtual speakers so that sounds seem like they're coming from very specific directions all around you. The audio will change accordingly as you move to deliver the most realistically immersive experience possible. The sound is delivered through headphones plugged into an audio jack on the headset. Wireless headphones will also work.
Aside from the headphone jack, the device has HDMI and USB ports and is currently wired with a 5-meter (16.4-foot) cable, although the team will look into making the consumer model wireless. The prototype connects via the wire to a small breakout box, which in turn connects to the PlayStation 4 (and optionally your television). The box includes a USB port, three HDMI ports and a power connector.
The prototype was made with comfort in mind. It was designed so that your head would bear the load without putting weight on your nose, cheeks or other parts of your face. An open-air design allows for airflow to help prevent lens fogging or overheating, but still manages to block light to your eyes to decrease potential distractions. There are various adjustment points on the prototype to make room for different head shapes.
All of the technical specs are tentative and could change in the next version or versions. For the consumer model, they are considering a higher quality OLED display, and they plan to work out any kinks and make it as plug-and-play as possible so that anyone will feel comfortable using it. No firm details for future versions have been released at the time of this writing.
What can Project Morpheus do?
According to the developers of Project Morpheus, some of the key elements to creating presence are low latency, high frame rate, good calibration, believable or consistent scale of game objects, clean image rendering and realistic 3D audio. Low latency and high frame rate are also keys to avoiding motion sickness. It also helps if there are contact points within the game that match the position of your actual hands, say on a steering wheel or other specialized controller or attachment like the PlayStation Move. With the right game and right implement, you could feel like you are actually swinging a sword or steering a car.
The breakout box can be connected to your television to display the image that the headset user's left eye is seeing so that others can watch the gameplay. There's even the possibility of non-headset users playing against the person with the headset, although at present only the headset-wearer's view is possible on the TV screen. Players may also be able to interact with the headset wearer through the PlayStation phone app or the PlayStation Vita portable device.
Even though Project Morpheus is a gaming console peripheral, the company hopes that it will be used for other things like shopping or visiting museums or other parts of the world -- even beyond. They have already worked with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on a Mars demo using real footage captured by the Curiosity rover.
Even though the device isn't out yet, a few games or partial game experiences have been demonstrated with the headset, including the following:
- "The Deep" -- a partial demo game created by Sony's London Studio where the player is lowered into the ocean in a diving cage to view, and sometimes battle, sea life.
- "Thief" -- a non-game build of the sections of the game "Thief" that allows the player to explore the "Thief" universe.
- "The Castle" -- a medieval game where the player uses two Move controllers to grab various weapons to beat, mangle or otherwise manipulate a dummy.
- "EVE: Valkyrie" -- a spaceship dog-fighting game made specifically for VR by CCP, creators of the popular online game "EVE."
Read More: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/project-morpheus4.htm
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