Sony Announces Virtual Reality Headset For PS4

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."

Comments

Watch It Succeed

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Most gut instinct thoughts of this can think of 8-9 good reasons to not have faith in Sony's ability to do this.

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.

Re:Watch It Succeed

[bloodhawk]

It is very questionable though whether the ps4 has the horsepower to run such a device. The choices to use such low end CPU and mid range graphics card make me highly doubtful they could produce such a headset without it being incredibly expensive due to the requirements to add processing capabilities to the device. ps4 struggles with 1080p to a TV, some games like Killzone don't even run at 1080p due to it not being powerful enough to handle it and that is supposedly one of their premium flagship games.

Re:Watch It Succeed

[MoonlessNights]

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.

Re:Watch It Succeed

[exomondo]

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.

Re:Watch It Succeed

[gl4ss]

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 oculus.. and if it had higher res, I would use it for viewing movies and maybe even desktop, in addition to gaming).

Re:Watch It Succeed

[MoonlessNights]

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 bandwidth was the limiting factor - in both texture upload and frame composite), so this data profile might push all the limits into direct computation.

In any case, if you are limited purely by computation, it is just a numbers game to see what (if any) trade-off would be required to get the second framebuffer for a given game.

Re: Watch It Succeed

[Anonymous Coward]

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 jaggies you would get due to the hardware simply not being able to keep up with the rendering demands. ALL of the graphics are rendered and created on the machine itself.

Re:Watch It Succeed

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

Same problem as all VR headsets ...

[Frag-A-Muffin]

Looks like it'll be annoying to wear for long (5+ min.) durations.

going to be terrible

[locopuyo]

Most PS4 games are rendered in sub 1080p resolution and scaled, some games run at 60 fps but often they run at 30 fps, and the fov in most games is 70 degrees or even less.

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.

Re:going to be terrible

[HalAtWork]

I'm sure there will be games made specifically for it that will have an appropriate detail level for achieving 1080p/60fps. Most games on PS4 aren't upscaled, I think you mean the Xbox One.

Re:going to be terrible

[citizenr]

Sure it can, but it means games with simple geometry and not a lot of content on the screen at the same time.

Re:going to be terrible

[AdamColley]

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 realistic but does it matter? Do you sit there pausing the game and criticising the graphics or actually play the damn thing, good lord.

Re:going to be terrible

[Sockatume]

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.

Re:Nope.

[wonkey_monkey]

(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

Re:Nope.

[wonkey_monkey]

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:90 vrs 110

[Sockatume]

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.