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Dreams to reality: Project Morpheus coming early 2016

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 9 Mar 2015, 10:51am

Dreams to reality: Project Morpheus coming early 2016

 The new headset has 9 sensors (the blue parts) now to track motion and orientation.

VR is rapidly gaining momentum as the next big thing. Its prominence has given rise to more and more headsets as the months and years go by. When the Oculus Rift appeared on the scene years ago, people finally sat up and took notice that technology is sufficiently advanced enough to create believable VR environments, as opposed to the monstrosities Nintendo created when it dabbled with VR in the past when it released the Virtual Boy.

Since the Virtual Boy, there hasn't been any VR headset from console makers until Project Morpheus was announced last year. Well, it's been a year since the announcement and the engineers and developers at Sony have been busy making improvements to the headset, significant ones. 

Project Morpheus' (yes, it's still being called that) newly improved tech includes more sensors for more accurate positioning and movement replication, a refresh rate of 120hz (double that of the older prototype) and a projected latency of under 100ms. The newest prototype has a wider field of vision, offering a 100 degrees view. The human eye's field of view is pegged at 114 degrees, so while Project Morpheus won't have as wide a field of view as we do naturally, it's remarkably better than the original 90 degrees field of view of the prototype shown at GDC 2014. Don't go moaning about the missing 14 degrees though as the headset shown at GDC 2015, improved as it is, is still not the final version. By the time the final version gets here next year, Sony may have tweaked the specs even more, as they've repeated stressed that the GDC 2015 headset is still not the final version.

The most significant change though was the move to an OLED display instead of the previous LED display. It's interesting to note that Sony tried having OLED screens in the past with the PS Vita but then switched to cheaper LED screens when they refreshed it. Sony cited cost cutting measures as one of the primary reasons for the downgrade so it's going to be interesting to see if they do the same thing with the Project Morpheus headset somewhere down the road. 

We've still got a long way to go to get our hands on the Project Morpheus headset. Sony's aiming for a 2016 release date, which could make it either the second or third big profile VR headset on the market, depending on whether Valve's HTC Vive headset and the Oculus Rift ships this year. With Microsoft's HoloLens and Razer's OSVR still incoming, the future of VR looks to be pretty bright, though it's anybody's guess at this point if the technology will be accepted by the masses.

It's going to be interesting find out, that's for sure.

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