Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
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.
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.
(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
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.