Sony Announces Virtual Reality Headset For PS4 112
An anonymous reader writes "Sony has announced 'Project Morpheus,' their project to develop a virtual reality headset for use with the PlayStation 4. 'Using a combination of Sony's own hardware, combining personal video viewers with PlayStation Move controllers, PlayStation engineers experimented with multiple prototypes.' They've been working on it for over three years — here's a picture of the current incarnation. The headset will use 3D audio tech that changes as players move their heads. One of their big goals is to make it extremely simple to use. They intend the display to be 1080p with a 90-degree field of view."
Watch It Succeed (Score:3)
But this gut instinct thought Facebook would be gone years ago, that the Wii would fail in the previous console generation and that Microsoft Office would have been made irrelevant years ago.
Sony has plenty of experience and desire to succeed in this area and is good at hardware and programming specs --- and this is exactly the kind of technology they could probably "get right" and have plenty of motivation to want to do it.
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Re:Watch It Succeed (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not sure what more processing capability would be required, though.
Presumably (and this might be nonsense since I have never used the system), they already determine what sound goes into each channel based on the location and orientation of the view of the player (this is old-hat OpenAL stuff). Determining the orientation is done via the analog input of the controller so really they just need to convert the gyroscope data of the headset into the orientation language used by their input system. Other than that, it should just be a matter of running the video and audio to the headset, as opposed to the TV.
The hard part with this is typically just in building the hardware light enough that it doesn't cause neck strain in the user.
If they are trying to build stereoscopic 1080p, then you have the difficulty of rendering the scene twice (well, 2x over the normal number of render passes) and then reading out from 2 framebuffers. That is mostly a question of memory bandwidth in the GPU, though, and how their display controllers arbitrate the bus.
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What is "processing required for the VR"? Beyond the question of whether or not they need to render a second frame for the other eye (or if they are just going to show the one scene to both eyes), what else is required?
The big question seems to be whether or not the device will be light enough and whether or not they can build it economically.
The most peculiar thing which comes to my mind is why they want 1080 at such a proximity that the eye is unlikely to see such high resolution.
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You sacrifice shaders that has too many passes or other things that has become the standard.
Re:Watch It Succeed (Score:4, Insightful)
If they are trying to build stereoscopic 1080p, then you have the difficulty of rendering the scene twice (well, 2x over the normal number of render passes) and then reading out from 2 framebuffers. That is mostly a question of memory bandwidth in the GPU, though, and how their display controllers arbitrate the bus.
How is rendering the scene twice mostly a question of memory bandwidth? Increasing the memory bandwidth alone generally won't do much to increase your ability to render the scene, the limitation here is primarily the amount of ALUs on the GPU not memory bandwidth.
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On one level, it depends on their memory topology (how many components are fighting over that particular memory bus - this _should_ be pretty good in a game console).
In general, rendering a large scene takes immense memory bandwidth as the data required to describe the scene (GL commands, texture data, other data for shaders, etc) and the representation of the output (framebuffer, other pixel buffers, etc) are very large.
Then again, my main background in this area is working with compositors (where bandwidt
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In general, rendering a large scene takes immense memory bandwidth as the data required to describe the scene (GL commands, texture data, other data for shaders, etc) and the representation of the output (framebuffer, other pixel buffers, etc) are very large.
You should have pretty much all of that uploaded to the GPU anyway, you aren't going to go and do it all again just to render the second frame of the same scene.
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Geeks with glasses whose heads are suspended in front of their body...
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I know this is possible with other devices as well, but I can stream 1080p content directly from my computer to my iPad and given that the total bitrate doesn't exceed my network capacity, there is no re-encoding.
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To simplify it for you try playing a 1080p file on your computer of your hardrive and then take that same file and stream it from another room and tell me what happens.
WTF? you have no clue what you are talking about. the images are not streamed to the console in multi player, just co-ordinates and basic user actions which are then all rendered LOCALLY. why multi player is harder is that the information is far more unpredictable and requires good CPU and GPU to be able to adequately keep up with the constant calculations, when your CPU or GPU isn't powerful enough (which is the case for ps4) then you need to start either using rendering tricks to avoid the tearing and jag
Re:Watch It Succeed (Score:5, Insightful)
ps4 struggles with 1080p to a TV
No it doesn't, at least not inherently.
some games like Killzone don't even run at 1080p due to it not being powerful enough to handle it
That was the game developer's choice. If the PS4 was twice as powerful, they'd have just thrown in twice as many* effects and explosions and it would still run at 720p and 30fps.
*yes, I know, it doesn't really scale that way.
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I know riling up fan boys is bad tact and all but seriously:
It's 2x as powerful as the nearest console competitor and faster than any single-GPU gaming rig that's more than a year old. Dollar for dollar it outperforms everything.
Care to put the PS4 up against my computer with it's single overclocked GTX 680. I'll eat my hat if a PS4 gets better framerates than I do on the same resolution and graphics settings and my computer has to deal with the bloat that is M$ windows, a TS server, and a web server running in the background.
I won't argue with the dollar vs dollar argument though. For what I paid to build my watercooled monster of a computer in 2012 I could have bought 3
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huh?
if they can get 1080p per eye and 90 degrees then I'm buying this the second it goes into the shop. and buy a ps4 to use it with too.
and sony has plenty of experience with head mounted displays, but the previous consumer display was for viewing movies(and did not have a high fov, the hmz).
but heck, ANYBODY who creates oculus rift style display with about same fov as rift and 1080p per eye gets my money(as long as it's under a thousand bucks. maybe even 1.5). it's just so fucking cool(I got the dev oculu
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My first thought seems to be opposite of most of the people I've seen post on this. Everyone keeps pointing out that it would be hard for the PS4 to be able to produce the desired effect due to the technical specifications of the console. I haven't been following the PS* close enough to comment on this, but I have been checking in on the VR headset scene on and off for quite some time. The technologies have been coming for years and years, and many gaming rigs have multiple-monitor capability (for stereosco
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Wow, thank you very much. I stand completely corrected. I remember seeing something early about it last year, but I hadn't realized how far it had come. Thanks a lot!
Same problem as all VR headsets ... (Score:3)
Looks like it'll be annoying to wear for long (5+ min.) durations.
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aye, strap a brick to your head where it hangs out 4-6 inches from your face and rests on the bridge of your nose, if that doesnt get you the eye strain of faked streoscopic vision and the refresh rate will
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what counterweight, the current incarnation has a open back, seems like the whole idea of a counterweight falls flat when there is no counterside to the weight, and none ever made or currently being presented have a counterweight.
sorry if I am pointing out the obvious, but I am not the one designing and trying to sell the things
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Sorry for pointing out the obvious, i.e., exactly what I said the first time.
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It doesn't rest on your nose. Sony's been doing HMDs for a while, they design around a padded headband that puts the load up top instead.
It's not "faked stereoscopic vision" when you have one viewpoint for each eye, that's literally the entirety of stereoscopy.
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yes just like watching a TV is identical to seeing it in real life
going to be terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
The Oculus Rift guys are pushing for 120+ fps, 1080p+ resolution, and 105 degree fov.
The Oculus guys did their research and found that all of this is required for a good experience. The PS4 hardware can't come close to meeting any of those requirements and their headset is going to be a terrible experience and just make people think all VR headsets are terrible.
Some big management guys at Sony are pushing for a VR Headset because it is going to be the next big thing, but they don't understand any of the technical details and it is just going to fail.
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most likely games targeting this headset won't be made to run 30 hz then...
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The difference is, the CD, Wii and VHS didn't make people sick, while a bad VR experience does.
All of these three products aren't great, but they're good enough. In VR, even the Oculus Rift doesn't reach the good enough level (yet), and this is even worse.
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The 3DS is shite and is still selling in some numbers.
So will this.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to work.
(Am I the only person who on seeing this thought "Hrm, a potentially cheaper than all the others VR headset, how will I be able to hack this for PC use etc.?")
Also, those whining that the PS4 doesn't have enough horsepower to run it are clearly dumber than pond scum, the PS3 had enough horsepower to do it. You may need a little less detail, explosions/reflections etc. might be a tad less rea
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I think most people just turn off the 3D feature of the 3DS. Unlike a head-mounted display, it's a gimmick, not a completely new medium.
I agree on the horsepower-part, though. If people like playing Minecraft on the Rift, the PS4 shouldn't have any troubles from a technological point of view.
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You think Sony is going to release a product that is cheaper than the competition? Good luck with that.
Re: potentially cheaper (Score:1)
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My understanding is that some people are inherently susceptible to VR sickness no matter how high the framerate or resolution that the display is at. Combine that with the people who will be sick and disoriented by the movement controls, and it's pretty clear that VR simply isn't for everyone. But there is, and will be, a market for it. Hell, there was a market for the Virtual Boy. And that thing was a complete headache-inducing piece of shit.
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Actually, reports from people that have used their most recent prototype ("crystal cove") seem to suggest that they've pretty much dealt with the issue of making people sick.
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Also wasn't the idea that the current gen would use 60 fps?
Maybe not / maybe that depends.
May it be that PS3 and 360 is 30 FPS and current gen more often 60 FPS and as you say more often around 1080p for the PS4 and less for the Xbox One.
As far as performance go I know a lot of people say that the design choices have limited performance and hence they can't get there wherever there it but the thing is that since they are designed as they are they can also take advantage of future evolution of the hardware s
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Re:going to be terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it can, but it means games with simple geometry and not a lot of content on the screen at the same time.
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You're talking complete shit. Most PS4 games come in at 1080p, most games run at 30FPS because that's the target for TV, and the FOV in a game is just a float variable so why would you think that was even relevant?
The Oculus Rift guys have a project to produce a VR headset, and so does Sony. They are all capable of doing research, and none of the suits at either company understand the technical details, so why would you think that was relevant either?
Meanwhile you have no understanding of the technical de
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FOV certainly can be. If the screen is a fixed distance from the eye, it takes up a certain percentage of your FOV based on screen size.
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It's a property of the sensor, not the console. The post he's replying to argued that because console games run with a narrow FOV (an optimisation for a large but distant monitor) they couldn't possibly drive a wide-field-of-view output device. Which is just wrong.
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This is actually a product of Sony's research labs, not "some big management guys", and as they outlined at the actual event, the prototype does something over a 90-degree FOV (105 is entirely possible) with 1080p resolution. The finished version will be somewhat better. Framerate will be decided by the software, not the hardware; you could write a PS4 game that ran at 120fps in 1080p quite easily if you weren't trying to make pretty screenshots with lots of pixel shaders, and the relatively low angular res
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A game's FOV and a display's FOV are two different things. You can literally change the former with one line of code.
Re: going to be terrible (Score:1)
It doesn't have to be better than Oculous Rift to succeed, and you know it. Oculous Rift succeeding will likely bring Sony's headset up with it, being the best option for the entire console market... assuming MS don't have a brilliant plan up their sleeves.
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The advantage that this has over the Oculus Rift is that, by the time it ships, it will work on a "plug in and play" basis with a mass-market games console which may quite reasonably have an installed base of 20 million+ by then. Sony basically "won" the BD vs HD-DVD battle by turning every PS3 into a BD player - this has some potential (though as I'll come onto, it's not guaranteed) to manage a similar victory over the Oculus Rift.
The big problem, of course, is that optional peripherals for consoles have a
sony (Score:1)
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90 vrs 110 (Score:2)
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Hold an iPhone maybe three inches from your eyes. That's about 90 degrees. It's not enough for VR. It would be like running around with blinders on.
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The PS4 only just came out, and it easily outperforms a $2,000 PC from 4 years ago, and most $1,000 PCs from last year. If you think the average gaming PC is higher spec than the PS4, you're an idiot. It's also twice as efficient as a PC, since it runs FreeBSD with the GPU mapped directly into userspace, instead of the Windows driver stack and the crappy Windows thread scheduler. It can easily cope with 1080p at 60Hz. Meanwhile the Rift is only using 120Hz as a hack because they can't figure out how to
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The FOV is decided by the lens they put in the eyepiece of the output device and a single variable in your graphics engine of choice. It's not a graphics performance issue.
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Viewing angle is not the same as visual angle or field of view. google is your friend.
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It doesn't say that anywhere.
If they use the same hardware guys that produced.. (Score:2)
..their other 'vr headsets' it will likely be total crap. SONY is an amazing company, but for some reason there are areas in which they simply produce garbage - this being one of them.
This doesn't mean it won't be a good device, just that SONY's history with VR headsets and tracking is terrible.
Let's hope it proves otherwise.
This is good for the Rift (Score:2)
First is the obvious thing to note, Sony's solution is PS4-only, while the Rift will (at least initially) be PC-only. So they're not directly competing in that respect. But more importantly is that for developers, Sony's solution and Oculus' solution pose all the same problems. You need to figure out input, locomotion, figure out the rules of VR (what feels good and what doesn't), figure out what sort of gameplay works best...
The more developers there are working on VR content, the better the entire VR ecos
90 degrees horizontal? (Score:2)
Why are VR headsets 90 degrees horizontal? humans can see close to 180 degrees horizontal. I thought FOV was one of the big benefits of VR headsets.
Re: 90 degrees horizontal? (Score:1)
180 degrees horizontal would be behind you. I think by 90 degrees horizontal they mean to the right/left of your eye. Oculus is going for over 100 degrees because you can rotate your eyes left/right which enables you to see slightly beyond 90 degrees to your side.
Just doing a test, my eyes can see about 140 degrees horizontal if I turn my eyes so neither device gets true full vision
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I think by 90 degrees horizontal they mean to the right/left of your eye.
Ahh, that makes more sense.
Final Fantasy XIV (Score:1)
I hope the upcoming PS4 version of Final Fantasy XIV will be compatible with the VR headset.
So many ignorant statements here... (Score:1)
Re: So many ignorant statements here... (Score:1)
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and yet their star games had to sacrifise resolution and framerate in order to run on the ps4
No, they didn't have to. The fact is, no matter how powerful the console, you can always chuck in more effects and more realistic asplosions by reducing the framerate and resolution to a (debatably) acceptable minimum.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
(probably 1080p 30FPS.. ugh..)
This is the decision of game designers who choose effects over framerate. The PS4 is perfectly capable of delivering 1080p at 60fps, or 2160p at 120fps*, subject to a reduced graphics budget, but none of them seem to want to go that way these days.
*by which I mean, it could calculate the values of 8.2 million pixels 120 times a second - other technical qualifications notwithstanding
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VR gives you a low angular resolution because your "screen" is spread over a wider field, which lets you get away with that reduced graphics budget. So a fringe benefit of VR might be games with a mode that gives you fewer shinies but a consistent, high framerate for a change.
Re: Yep. (Score:1)
Carmack confirms PS4 is capable of VR resolution and framerate...
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carm... [twitter.com]
I still think the PC will make a better platform but to each there own.
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