Sony VR Headset/Project Morpheus/PlayStation VR

[MrFox]

I have to say I am agreeing with @Prophecy2k remarks.

Technological explanations are interesting and I am grateful for them. But when talking about PSVR expectations, it would be wise to start with the game journalists going around trade shows, and thousands of gamers who actually tried the damn thing. There are hundreds of impressions around forums and blogs to read. Some better than others.

Personally my experience is only with DK2+Unity at my work place, and we are not playstation developers. My comments are about my understanding of the tech, and my expectations for PSVR are speculative. For the record I'm one of those who will have both PSVR and Oculus (as long as games are guaranteed to work with my 780, otherwise it will wait for my PC upgrade cycle). I might be incessantly optimistic about PSVR because the "new Sony" continuously did everything I wished for (which I express sometimes in a rather activist way). I wish for things, I predict things, and I expect things. #dealwithit

 

[MrFox]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-playstation-vr-external-processor-revealed

When they said they beefed up the power in the external module they were not kidding. The new prototype has a small fan, and the power supply is 36 watts max. Physical dimensions are 140x140x35mm. So it's much thicker than the previous prototype (makes way for the radial fan diameter, and the exhaust/intake).

So let's suppose power delivery is designed with the same power margin as the PS4, it would be around 22 watts power consumption.

The headset can't really need much more than 2 or 3 watts (in reference, the note 4 screen is 1.5 watt at max brightness). Which leaves 20 watts for processing power.

 

[orangpelupa]

So... Multiple vita chips inside of that?

 

[MrFox]

Heck that is enough power for a Cell processor.

 

[London Geezer]

Heck that is enough power for a Cell processor.

Oh no Why did you just do that??? You know what's going to happen now.

 

[MrFox]

Shhhhh! You are exposing my evil plan!

 

[eastmen]

So now this box which wasn't going to do much needs a lot of power and active cooling ?

Also external PSU ? Those heathens !

 

[BRiT]

So now this box which wasn't going to do much needs a lot of power and active cooling ?

They could drop the power consumption and cooling requirements by using DPUs.

 

[MrFox]

The CELL is much more powerful than a mere DPU thing, it was invented by Ken Kutatagi himself, our God.

Ken was right all along!!!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So now this box which wasn't going to do much needs a lot of power and active cooling ?

It is a curiousity. At first we were thinking reprojection was an advanced image manipulation system with tweening. Then we learnt it's just a shift and scale and doesn't need much power and in theory could be solved by a mobile SOC. But then we see a big, actively cooled box. That suggests the former, that the reprojection system is quite advanced. It's probably a case of using off-the-shelf components for now where a custom part would be more efficient, but Sony don't know what the demands are and don't want to commit to fab'ing custom silicon.

 

[London Geezer]

PSVR Final Form

 

[goonergaz]

Another day of no RRP

 

[Prophecy2k]

I shudder to think what this means for the cost of entry of PS VR?

 

[London Geezer]

Well if they put old, big and hot chips in there, the silicon won't be that expensive.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I shudder to think what this means for the cost of entry of PS VR?

Maybe $30 difference between a big box solution and the minimal solution? It can't be a huge amount of cost unless that breakout box has lots of RAM and processing power.

 

[Prophecy2k]

PSVR Final Form

"Pffffttt... smaller than the PSU I'm using to power the rig I'll build for PC VR" - PC master race

 

[DieH@rd]

So... Multiple vita chips inside of that?

There is a use case for something like that. They could have PU chip that can run rudimentary VR applications, for example Virtual Cinema. PU App can render "cinema building" side of things, while PS4 is busy rendering for example Bloodborne. PU takes HDMI stream from PS4, and slaps that feed onto the cinema canvas. Few $ of investment = VR Cinema compatibility with 100% "flat TV" PS4 titles [and other types of multimedia].

PU processing can also be tasked to run elaborate 3D VR OS [multitasking from game to game, browsing PSN Store, social, etc]. Not rendering that on PS4 could leave more performance to the game devs.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

It could be doing a number of things. I thought this paragraph from Digital Foundry was quite interesting:

"The initial breakout box we saw took the warped output produced by VR, zeroed in on one eye view and then stretched the image back into shape. This produced the effect of higher resolution in the centre of the social screen image, with progressively lower resolution on the edges. We have to wonder if the second-gen development box does something a little more advanced."

I wonder if it's possible that the box is doing exactly the opposite. i.e., is it possible that the PS4 renders a complete 960x1080 view for each eye (not the windowed/circular version) and the box warps that image so that it's then displayed in a circular fashion causing a supersampling effect at the edges?

It's a completely mental idea, and probably not what's being done, but fun to speculate on anyway.

Edit: I like how the box looks like a baby PS4.

 

[DieH@rd]

Another nice thing that could be offloaded to the PU is the camera data processing [dots motion tracking for Headset/DS4/Move].

 

[Cyan]

PSVR Final Form

Single-user or monouser (whatever it's called), batch processing probably, from the first or second generation of computer science (most probably), looks similar to an Eniac, and we need more women in computing.

It could be doing a number of things. I thought this paragraph from Digital Foundry was quite interesting:

"The initial breakout box we saw took the warped output produced by VR, zeroed in on one eye view and then stretched the image back into shape. This produced the effect of higher resolution in the centre of the social screen image, with progressively lower resolution on the edges. We have to wonder if the second-gen development box does something a little more advanced."

I wonder if it's possible that the box is doing exactly the opposite. i.e., is it possible that the PS4 renders a complete 960x1080 view for each eye (not the windowed/circular version) and the box warps that image so that it's then displayed in a circular fashion causing a supersampling effect at the edges?

It's a completely mental idea, and probably not what's being done, but fun to speculate on anyway.

Edit: I like how the box looks like a baby PS4.

View attachment 1062

It's finally wired then, and it doesn't get its power from the PS4 gamepad nor a USB port. The games they showed in the PlayStation Experience conference didn't look computationally expensive, but I am not so sure right now it is going to be the standard in the future if you have a external device that can take away some of the computing out of the PS4. The PS4 and the external device look nice together, they make a good couple.