Evidenced by Conan O’Brien at E3, people are really enjoying Project Morpheus. As PlayStation Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida told Polygon though, “It’s not enough. It’s coming close, but there isn’t enough in terms of creating real experiences with a sense of presence. You really need to be able to feel that you are standing on the edge of a cliff. Tech-wise, there are a few things we want to include to really nail it from a hardware and system software standpoint.”
One of the ways they’ll be able to achieve better experiences is through the developers. While Yoshida wouldn’t comment on how many dev kits they’ve sent out so far, just that they are releasing them in”bunches,” he did tease, “We have a long list of waiting developers.”
Some of these developers are no doubt indie studios, with Yoshida saying, “I just love in general the whole spirit of treating it like independent game development. We have this piece of hardware that is not fully done or named and we don’t have a release date, but we’re trying it out, getting people’s feedback on it.” Of course, there’s also going to be a lot of people making games for the Oculus VR who port their titles to Project Morpheus, and Shuhei explained just how easy that will be:
It’s not much more work then goes into making a game 3D stereoscopic. The idea is very similar: you create two images to fall on each eye, so it’s pretty straightforward. Maybe a couple weeks to get it running and viewing in the Morpheus, however, you immediately realize the game design for console, or TV doesn’t work. It just breaks, it’s not a great experience.
Adam Boyes, VP of Publisher and Developer Relations at PlayStation, offered that going from Oculus to Morpheus is “basically the same as porting from PC to PS4.”
Boyes also addressed the difficulty of getting developers to work a new machine with no release date, where he revealed that Sony doesn’t know Morpheus’ release date, price, or whether they’ll bundle anything in with it:
What we say to them is, ‘We’re going on a journey, there’s no release date.’ So the caveat’s around. We don’t know what the price point is going to be. We don’t know if we’re going to bundle any content with it. We know none of that. So we’re going on a journey and you’re free to go on that journey with that information. And because many have been doing parallel VR work they say, ‘Hey, I want to try that. I want to see how that works.’
When Sony does announce a release date for Project Morpheus (or anything about Project Morpheus, really), we’ll let you know.
