VRFocus: First Hands-On with Project Morpheus

VRFocus - Sony Computer Entertainment's Project Morpheus was yet another of their poorly kept secrets, and yet little could have prepared the audience at yesterday's 'Driving the Future of Innovation at Sony Computer Entertainment' for just how accomplished the device would be. Today however, VRFocus was granted access to the playable builds of both The Deep and The Castle Demo. There'll be hands-on previews of both of these titles coming very soon, but before that there's something more important to discuss: the headset itself.

[Pillsbury1]

It's great to see Sony has been working on this for years and are trying to get it right the first time.

[AgentSmithPS4]

I can see why your dough-boy is so happy, soon he'll be getting VR-poked in the gut.

[Dabigsiebowski]

Ok how about you tell us about the actual performance.

It's nice to see that it's light and very comfy which is very important.

[ABizzel1]

So far developers had said:

The Good

1. Full body tracking thanks to the headset, DualShock4 / Move, and camera
2. The resolution is good, and near and far image clarity is better than Oculus
3. Comfortable
4. Demos are already impressive

The bad:

1. Tracking isn't quite where it needs to be, compared to Oculus
2. The audio in the headset is a bit quite, and needs more improvement
3. Calibration resetting needs to be quicker

Overall

It's a great VR headset already, and has tons of support all over multiple industries from NASA, movies, game developers, indies, and more. It just needs better tracking (which will happen before launch), better audio (which can also happen before launch, although GDC is louder than a house), faster recalibration to get in and out of games faster. The final concerns are pricing ($249 please), and game content (a bunch of devs on board, but we need actual good content). If those 2 things aren't in sync come launch then it doesn't matter how good the device is.

[kazuma999]

GIVE US .HACK GAMES WITH THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[MasterCornholio]

"allowing for users with or without glasses to avoid the unfortunate eye-contact that often is experienced with the Oculus Rift DK1 and HD editions."

YES!!!!!!!!!!

P.S I wear glasses.

[PoSTedUP]

sounds great so far. sounds like unless you look down off of the screen youll be fully immersed?

[harrisk954]

Well, being that this is an early build, the lack of complete enclosure below the screen will likely be addressed before launch.

[jamstorr86]

not keen on how you can see the floor when wearing the visor. hopefully they will solve this. From other accounts i have read the resolution isn't as good as oculus' device. This is to be expected though, as i suspect the rift is further on in its development.

[TristanPR77]

Sony is a hardware design god. I'm pretty confident the Morpheus will be better than Oculus at least on the hardware front.