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Project Morpheus makes you look like Daft Punk, plunges you into 3D worlds

Adam Rosenberg
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this 500 playstation vr bundle is the real price of entry for sonys headset project morpheus gdc 2014

Sony chose fertile soil to plant the seeds for its virtual reality debut, Project Morpheus. The 2014 Game Developer’s Conference isn’t exactly an E3 marketing machine sort of environment, but the freshly announced PlayStation 4-friendly headset isn’t exactly ready for consumers to chomp down on either. What it is ready for is content, and fresh approaches to creating that content. Suddenly it makes a whole lot of sense that the company chose to trot its nifty VR headpiece out in front of an army of developers.

We snagged a heads-on peek at what’s going on inside of Morpheus and the good news is, it’s close to where the Oculus Rift is right now. Sony’s first crack at virtual reality is nearly on the level with the top contender in that space, with head tracking, motion tracking (compliments of the PS4 camera), and 1080p resolution split between your two eyes (for a resolution of 960×1080 per eye). It’s a stylish piece of tech too, even in prototype form, with rounded edges and a black strip across the front with white strips backlit by blue LEDs above and below it. 

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Sony offered up three different demos at its GDC booth to showcase the capabilities of Morpheus in its current form. The first, called The Deep, is a relatively non-interactive piece in which your scuba diver descends into the ocean depths from inside a sharkproof cage. That sharkproofiness is put to the test when a stream of blood from a small cut attracts one of the undersea killers.

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You remain stationary inside the cage for the length of the demo while the shark circles and, eventually, forces its way in. Still, The Deep effectively highlights a few elements that make Morpheus compelling. Although you never leave the cage, you do clutch a DualShock 4 gamepad in one hand throughout the demo, with the controller doubling as a flare gun in the virtual space. The combination of the DualShock and a PS4 Eye camera allows for the game to register and track 1:1 movements of whichever hand you’re clutching the controller in. It’s precise enough to know when you rotate your wrist. The camera also reads your body to a limited extent; bend your knees in the real world while you’re looking down at  your diver’s body, and you’ll see those virtual knees bend as well. That’s not something we’ve seen yet from Oculus.

The second demo, referred to only as Castle, is a bit more elaborate. This one does away with the DualShock, instead putting one PS Move control wand in each hand. The motion sensing devices double as your in-game hands, and you can use each one’s trigger buttons to grab items or clench hands into a fists. Inside the headset, you view the world from the perspective of a knight standing in a castle courtyard. The demo cycles through a series of training exercises as you take on an armored dummy with your fists, swords, and a crossbow.

Bend your knees in the real world while you’re looking down at  your diver’s body, and you’ll see those virtual knees bend as well.

If The Deep is a look at how the PS4 Eye is used to enhance virtual reality as viewed through Morpheus, then Castle is a demonstration of how Move controllers – introduced in 2010 – could potentially be utilized in a VR space. The training dummy, which is easily dismembered with swift punches and sword swipes, can be manipulated in a number of ways. You can grab its arm and hold it out with one hand and then chop it off with your sword-wielding hand, or punch its head clean off its body, or even pick up an excised limb and wield it as a weapon. 

Castle also includes a section that involves shooting a crossbow at targets (along with that poor, abused dummy), which is an unusual experience at first. In most shooters, you’d simply press and hold a trigger button to aim down your equipped weapon’s sights. In VR, however, the most natural thing to do when looking down the sights of the crossbow is to close one eye and bring the weapon relatively close to your face, just as you would in a proper physical space with an actual ranged weapon.

The final playable portion of the demo turned out to be a sitdown with the latest iteration of CCP Games’ EVE: Valkyrie, the space dogfighting sim that’s been the subject of much discussion and excitement since its 2013 reveal. The game looks and feels more polished than ever, with sharper graphics, a sleeker in-cockpit design, and – most importantly – a more fleshed out experience. The ships you’re shooting at are now durable enough to withstand more than one missile strike from the head tracking-powered lock-on missiles. This means you’ve got to fly more skillfully if you want to score kills, which serves as a stronger hook for immersing you in the virtual space.

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The experience of using Morpheus is similar in many ways to how Oculus Rift feels in its present, post-Crystal Cove state. The LCD screens might even be a wee bit sharper than the Rift’s, though you get noticeably more motion blur when the Sony device is strapped to your head. The Morpheus fits onto your head using two straps that allow you to adjust the fit around back and release tab beneath the front-mounted eyepiece that allows you to tweak the distance between your eyes and the twin displays (presumably to better accommodate glasses wearers). 

Sony’s got a ways to go with Morpheus, but the army of developers that were on hand for its unveiling should help to prepare a flow of content for its eventual release. Let’s just hope that the consumer model still makes you look like an extra in Daft Punk.

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Adam Rosenberg
Adam Rosenberg
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Previously, Adam worked in the games press as a freelance writer and critic for a range of outlets, including Digital Trends…
Virtual Insanity: 3D cameras on a drone let you feel airborne with Oculus Rift
dual camera equipped drone controlled oculus headset future aerial videography rift drones norwegian university of science

Thanks to camera-equipped drones such as the DJI Phantom 2 Vision, also called multicopters or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), we've seen a lot of beautiful aerial videos in the recent past. But these things have a downside to them, as they usually need two people to operate: one person to control the drone, and one person to control the camera. Thanks to a project at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, this could soon change.
In an attempt to create an immersive experience that could be employed "for personal enjoyment, as well as for performing tasks involving visual inspection of otherwise inaccessible structures and terrain features," the researches hooked up an Oculus Rift virtual reality head-mounted display to a DJI Phantom drone copter. But they did not just create a direct link between the headset and the drone.
What they did was to equip the drone with dual cameras for a true 3D experience, and forward the drone operator's head movement – recorded by the Oculus Rift's orientation sensors – to the camera module. This way, the operator can change the camera's orientation simply by moving his or her head, thereby eliminating the need for a second person to operate the camera.
There are still a couple of issues with this project, though, chiefly getting the two cameras on the drone copter aligned correctly for a truly immersive 3D view. (If the cameras aren't aligned correctly, the operator's brain will be unable to combine the incoming stereo images into a three dimensional image.) Also, currently the screens in the Oculus Rift don't resolve high enough for a true reality-like experience.
But further work on this technology should produce better results and could very well lead to a whole new generation of drones that are controlled through VR headsets. Which could, in the end, help revolutionize the way that aerial video footage is taken.
(Via TechCrunch)

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Sony’s Project Morpheus in pictures and in action
sony joins the vr fray with project morpheus a headset for playstation 4 mem 1v2

Sony revealed its Oculus Rift competitor, the PlayStation 4-exclusive VR headset, Project Morpheus (a codename), at the 2014 Game Developer's Conference, and it's a nifty piece of tech. It works similarly to Oculus VR's hardware, though it's got the advantage of supporting the motion-sensing Move controllers that Sony released midway through the PlayStation 3's life. It also makes you look like a member of Daft Punk when you wear it, which inherently makes it cool.
We've got no sense of when the headset will be released or how much it will cost, but it appears to be far along in its development. It's a safe bet that you won't be able to get one by the time holiday 2014 rolls around (you never know, of course), but sometime in 2015 seems like a distinct possibility.

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Sony’s long-standing interest in virtual reality gives Project Morpheus an edge
sony project morpheus review press

The most impressive thing that Sony’s Project Morpheus could possibly do in its 2014 Game Developer’s Conference reveal is work, and work well. The virtual reality headset immediately carries all of the same promise evident in the most recent iterations of Oculus VR’s Rift offering, and we’ve only just seen it for the first time. Of course, Sony’s been working on Morpheus in secret, compared to Oculus’ much more public crowd-funded development.
"We've been doing VR for this project for about three years, so we definitely started before Oculus was even funded," Sony U.S. R&D senior software engineer Anton Mikhailov tells Digital Trends in a GDC interview. "Certainly, they brought a lot of steam to the whole VR ecosystem, so that's been a great help for us as well as them. We're not ignoring their contributions. We think they're a fantastic group of people who are very excited about VR, but we started our project quite awhile ago."

Sony has a history with head-mounted displays that extends all the way back to 1997's Glasstron, of which multiple models were released. That was later succeeded by the HMZ-T1 in late 2011, with T2 and T3 models following in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The Glasstron actually featured some limited game support, but all of these earlier Sony devices amounted to little more than floating screens inside a headset, with a projected image looming large in an otherwise blacked out space. Hardware and software support for head-tracking got its biggest boost in years with the success of Oculus on Kickstarter, though that's largely a product of great timing. As some form of tech is more widely embraced, expensive supply lines that drive up the cost to consumers become less of an issue.
Sony's Glasstron
"This is similar to what we saw with motion control, where you get some big market like cellphones bringing down the cost of something like motions sensors significantly," Mikhailov says. "So basically, you have this cross-section right now where display panels have gotten small, high-resolution, and affordable, whereas before to get such a panel you'd need to go to military-grade VR simulations. Now you can buy them for a reasonable price. So at this point we can actually make a good quality VR system that is still affordable for people to purchase."
"It just seemed like the right time. That's why you're seeing a lot of this kind of advancement happening very rapidly."
Sony hasn't yet assigned any sort of release date for Morpheus, as the hardware is still in development. The Sony-developed demos that we spent time with on the show floor at GDC are more proof-of-concept than sneak previews of future games. Sony's research team is actively thinking about what a content-rich future in VR looks like, however. There's nothing confirmed, of course, though we do know that CCP Games' in-development space combat simulator EVE: Valkyrie is coming to Morpheus. Eidos Montreal's Thief was also converted for demo purposes at the show, but it's still undeniably early days for the software development side of Morpheus.
"At this point we can actually make a good quality VR system that is still affordable for people to purchase."
"We really think that presence is the killer app for VR," Mikhailov says. "The feeling that you get that you are surrounded by a real world. So I think just feeling that you're in a fantastical environment is already worth the price of admission. Now how you design games in that environment is fairly open-ended. We don't have much to draw upon. Not many people have done virtual reality games."
"It's a little too early to say what is sort of the main genre or whatever, it's all very up in the air. That's why we're revealing this at the Game Developer's Conference, because we want all the developers to come along and learn with us. We want to be very open with people about our learnings and hope that they'll be very open with us as well so we can bring this industry up."
Even input methods remain a massive question mark. It's one that Oculus continues to wrestle with as well. Is a standard gamepad right? Motion sensing wands? Some sort of elaborate hybrid, like Sixense's STEM system? It's here that Sony actually has something of a leg up. It remains to be seen if VR content demands don't call for revisions on the controller hardware side, but both the PlayStation 4's DualShock 4 gamepad and the Move motion-sensing wand are effectively VR-ready when paired with a PlayStation 4 Eye.

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