Samsung's Gear VR has just gone on sale in the US, firing the starting pistol to this bold new age of virtual reality. But the Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus are yet to hit the market, and while our own sources inform us that Oculus will arrive by Summer 2015, we've heard nothing on the PS4's counterpart.
Sony is also keeping schtum, refusing to give us even a vague idea of when we might be strapping its glowing blue headset to our faces. However, speaking at a PlayStation event at which TechRadar was in attendance, PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan did spend a few moments discussing Morpheus, but dashed hopes that we may see it soon.
"[Morpheus] is right now purely an R&D project, but is something we're really, really excited about," he said. "Immersiveness is one of the key features of the game experience, and with each generation the immersiveness has increased and has become more compelling. That change has been incremental but when you start moving to virtual reality you make a step change in immersiveness."
That all sounds great, Ryan, but when can we buy one? "There are many things to work through, many challenges, business challenges, technical challenges, much to resolve," was his comment on the matter. "Watch this space".
Homework time
Sony has been working on Morpheus since 2010, but speaking on a panel at the PlayStation Experience, Yoshida revealed that Morpheus started actually out as a "grassroots" activity before it turned into something more serious.
"This project actually started as a grassroots activity, almost like homework," he said (via VR Focus). "So out of work efforts by many people in studios and R&D teams and hardware groups. As soon as we released PS Move, studio people started to gather handmade virtual reality systems taking what's available in the market, the head-mounted displays to watch movies... a bit low-res at the time.
"But when you put together PS Move and those HMDs you can make, like, a virtual reality system and connect that to PS3."
Yoshida went on to talk about the God of War prototype demo that was shown off earlier this year, and how that helped in getting the attention of Sony's upper echelons. "That's when the company recognised from Japan that, 'Well, actually we can make it a real product when we release PS4'. PS3 was good but not good enough."
We go hands on with Project Morpheus
