During GDC 2014, Sony and Oculus Rift both had virtual reality headset announcements. For Sony it was the announcement of Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset designed for gaming, and for Oculus Rift, it was the announcement of the Development Kit 2 that would be going up for pre-order.
While Sony would seem like a strong competitor to Oculus Rift, the latter appears to be pretty pleased with Sony’s entrance, stating that with Sony entering into the fray, it lends the technology a bit more credibility. That being said, Digital Foundry has analyzed both Project Morpheus and Oculus Rift and has discovered that Sony’s headset is pretty close to the Oculus Rift’s headset in terms of specs.
According to the report, “By most accounts, the Sony VR prototype is a very, very close match to the specs of the second-generation Oculus Rift dev kit. Screen resolution is the same, sensor frequency is a match and a similar system of using an external camera to check positional movement is integrated.”
However the report goes on to state that there are areas of Sony’s display that could use some additional work. “There are just a couple of areas where Sony needs to improve – the 1080p LCD screen suffers compared to the OLED display in the second-gen Rift, while some confusion surrounds the 90-degree field of view and how that stacks up against the 110 degrees found in both iterations of the Oculus Rift.”
Of course it should be noted that Project Morpheus is Sony’s first prototype that they officially put on display to the public, although the project has been in the works for the past three years. Perhaps Sony’s next prototype will be able to correct whatever issues Project Morpheus might have at the moment.
In any neither the Oculus Rift nor Project Morpheus look like they’re close to actually hitting the consumer market, so hopefully by then all the kinks would have been ironed out.
Filed in . Read more about GDC, Project Morpheus, Sony, Virtual Reality (VR) and Wearable Tech.