14 DAY TRIAL // Sony surprised a lot of gamers by announcing its new Project Morpheus virtual reality headset during the ongoing Game Developer Conference event, but at least one company is very happy to hear that the electronics and gaming giant is now focused on the emerging tech.
Palmer Luckey, who is the original creator of the Oculus Rift, the only VR solution now available on the market, tells Eurogamer that Sony has a lot more resources than most other companies and it has the power to make the technology mainstream.
He states, “The VR industry isn’t good enough and developed enough where we have the luxury to say we’re going to own the whole thing. People aren’t convinced that VR is cool, or that it’s going to happen. A player like Sony doing a good job would help people be convinced of that.”
Project Morpheus is associated with the PlayStation 4 and the company says that it will include complex tech that will allow video games to run at full 1080p resolutions and 60 frames per second.
Plenty of more details about the device are promised for the future and Sony certainly has the marketing power to make the new concept a success, as long as it delivers the promised experiences.
Luckey adds, “They need to do something that shows how good VR could be – and not something like PS Move. It was really good technology, but it was born as a response to things like the Wii and Kinect, and I don’t think Sony supported it as strongly as they could have.”
The PlayStation Move was supposed to deliver motion tracking for the PlayStation 3 and was at one point rumored to be part of the company’s next-gen plans, but it was largely abandoned after it failed to be widely adopted.
During the GDC, the company behind the Oculus Rift also announced a second version of its own developer kit, which is designed to offer improved performance and better virtual reality experiences.
There are currently no plans to adapt it to work for next-gen consoles and Sony has said that its own Project Morpheus will remain linked to the PlayStation 4 platform at the moment.
Much about the future of virtual reality will be linked to adoption from players and that also means that developers need to integrate it into important coming video games in order to make the tech attractive.