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March 21st, 2014, 18:12 Posted By: wraggster
It's been a long time coming, but Sony has finally revealed its take on the great virtual reality dream. Hot on the heels of Oculus Rift, Project Morpheus can be seen as mainstream validation of VR and the first serious attempt at bringing it to a home console since Sega's aborted 1993 vintage headset. In theory, PlayStation 4 is the perfect home for virtual reality, too - Sony has the most powerful console GPU, a ready-made 3D controller in the form of PlayStation Move and a wealth of developers with direct experience creating stereoscopic 3D games. Not only that, but it also possesses a remarkably talented R&D team.But while the mainstream access and the surrounding ecosystem are unrivalled, to what extent can Sony match the cutting-edge technology offered by Oculus Rift? The advantages of the PC for a pioneering new gameplay experience are numerous: as a completely open platform, anyone can buy the kit and experiment, from indie developers to hackers and to major game publishers. Not only that, but both the VR hardware itself and PC rendering technology can adapt and evolve more quickly. Already there has been discussion of 4K VR displays, and even that might not be quite enough for the optimal immersive experience. In working with a fixed architecture and with limited scope for enhancements, Sony has to get Morpheus right on its first attempt.We see console VR as a major challenge for Sony on two fronts: hardware and software. On the former, what is clear is that Sony has done everything right based on the tools and technologies available. By most accounts, the Sony VR prototype is a very, very close match to the specs of the second-generation Oculus Rift dev kit. Screen resolution is the same, sensor frequency is a match and a similar system of using an external camera to check positional movement is integrated. There are just a couple of areas where Sony needs to improve - the 1080p LCD screen suffers compared to the OLED display in the second-gen Rift, while some confusion surrounds the 90-degree field of view and how that stacks up against the 110 degrees found in both iterations of the Oculus Rift. Project Morpheus Specs
Sony is keen to point out that the current Morpheus prototype could see considerable revisions before it is released in consumer form, but these are the specs as they stand.
- Component: Processor unit, head-mounted unit
- Display Method: LCD
- Panel Size: 5-inch
- Panel Resolution:1920×RGB×1080 (960×RGB×1080 per eye)
- Field of View: 90 degrees
- Sensors: Accelerometer, Gyroscope
- Connection interface: HDMI + USB
- Function: 3D audio, Social Screen
The Verge's eyes-on report suggests that the immersive effect of Morpheus aren't as impressive as Oculus, but as Sony's Anton Mikhailov told Eurogamer in an interview due to be published this weekend, there is no current standard on VR specifications, so perhaps the field of view comparison isn't quite as cut and dried as it seems.
The Project Morpheus prototype headset - the development version that game-makers will be using to craft their own console VR experiences. While more consumer-friendly in appearance than the second-generation Oculus Rift development kit, it has a clear display disadvantage. Sony has pointed out to us that it is looking at a similar OLED screen set-up for the production version.
"Is the difference diagonal or horizontal? That's the key there - diagonal is basically 1.4 times the horizontal. Ours is 90 degrees horizontal. If you do that calculation diagonal it's over 100, or somewhere - I think it's quite complicated doing the maths because the optics we're using are fairly non-standard, so I can't give you an exact answer. But it's certainly far above 90," Mikhailov told us."Because this is the wild west of VR, we don't have a standard way of measuring things. When you buy a 46-inch TV, you know they mean diagonal, not horizontal. If we'd like to compare specs, we need to get a very clear spec in line. And actually optics are even more complex than that - you know, for the head-mount displays it's a little strange because the aspect ratio might not even be 16:9. What you really want is a vertical field of view and a horizontal field of view. Diagonal can be kind of misleading. It gets complicated, and the numbers range wildly - basically we can quote numbers between 90 and 120, depending on how you want to talk about it."Another thing is glasses and eye relief. When you get closer to the optics in VR displays, you get a wider field of view. So if you're quoting a number that's at the lens, that could be quite a bit wider. The specs we quote is 90 degrees field of view for a glasses wearing person at 15mm eye relief or further. So it's a very specific spec."What is heartening is that Sony's prototype design is hugely improved over its existing virtual reality personal viewers, and that having approached the same set of problems as Oculus, it has come up with a solution that is, by and large, extremely similar to the second-gen Rift dev kit. There are even some additional bonuses: unlike the PC kit, the audio is standardised with an innovative virtual surround system, something that Oculus is currently leaving to PC owners to figure out for themselves.While the spec is still in a state of flux, it's likely that the 960x1080 per eye resolution will remain in place for the final version, and based on our experience with the Oculus Rift, something of a reality check is probably in order in terms of what this actually means. On a traditional game, that entire screen area occupies most of your focus, but on a virtual reality set-up, the resolution has to do much more - it stretches out to encompass your entire field of view, including peripheral vision. So, on a basic level, far fewer pixels are spent on the areas that your eyes are actually focusing on.Here's how the original Oculus Rift distorts an image. Here we see 640x800's worth of resolution per eye, but the actual main viewable area is much, much lower.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...-spec-analysis
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