Project Morpheus is a virtual reality headset being developed by Sony for both the Playstation 4 and PSVita. It's designed to be fully functional with the Playstation 4, and displays on any compatible TV what the user is seeing. Provided Sony's vision for the project comes to fruition, we could be looking at the next big thing in video games.
Sony's Richard Marks, a senior researcher at Sony Computer Entertainment America, recently spoke at the Playstation Experience 2014. He discussed his involvement with Project Morpheus, as well as filling us in on where the project is headed.
“If you stop with just the motion, that’s still VR but you don’t have any way to change the world around you,” Marks said. “Maybe you can do something with you head but other than that you feel somewhat limited and especially gamers want to do more than that usually.
“And that’s where I think a lot of the next technologies come in is how you interact with the world. We have some ability to do that now through the DualShock or through the PlayStation Move for example but we want to do even more than we can now. And some of that kinda of force feedback related technology is a really good enhance interaction capability.”
To be frank, Marks is right. One of the greatest failings of creations like the Oculus Rift is that these other virtual reality options don't give players a way to interact with the game world. Sure, it's cool to look around a virtual space in 360 degrees, but what if you could interact with that environment?
“I’m not a can of too much gear,” Marks continued. “I want to have an easy in, easy out experience. So our focus has always been on the least amount of wearing of things. Like, controllers are great because you can just set them down when you’re done, right? And that’s a really good thing that we like to try to keep is that easy ability to– low encumbrance is I guess the goal. So we’re looking at force-feedback technologies that are either built into controllers for example or built into very simple to wear things that can come off quickly, not too much like Lawnmower Man."
“There’s also some great research into hand-tracking through camera so you don’t have to wear anything and you can see your hand in VR and that’s very compelling actually,” he concluded.
Marks' minimalist approach to Project Morpheus should pay off, should the project come to fruition. He seems to realize that gamers just want good video games, and extra peripherals are often looked at as an extra time or money sink. The peripheral market is a niched one, so Marks and his team will have to tread very carefully.
