Sony VR Headset/Project Morpheus/PlayStation VR

[Prophecy2k]

I don't think so, but their deal might have an option for someone else to publish it later on PC. Might

edit: And I wouldn't just ignore the "first on PS4" text before the video posted earlier. Those typically mean exactly that it'll be a timed exclusive.

I guess it would depend who owns the IP. I would assume Crytek do, hence the "First on PS4" announcement, which would likely mean that Crytek could shop around for someone else to publish on PC at ta later time post-PSVR release.

Obviously, if Sony owns it then it wouldn't see a PC release ever (unless someone really clever writes a PS4 emulator).

 

[Shortbread]

Sizzle reel

There's a FF in there. Add to them Robinson, GT, Tekken. There's quite a few titles if they all come next year with PSVR.

Sony is really invested into making PSVR not just a niche product or gimmicky device... seems to be a solid platform. If the price is reasonable ($299 or less), then Sony maybe the company to really usher in VR for the masses. After seeing the games, I can honestly say I want one now.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Yep, I'll put my name down the moment the preorders open.

 

[DieH@rd]

GT Sport VR announcement is the real megaton news.

Also the reveal that over 200 devs are working on PSVR games. Sony needs to push not only great software support, but ease of use. I think they will nail the both.

 

[orangpelupa]

i really really hope Sony will release it here with reasonable price, not following the super uber utterly strong Dollar. In PS4 and some Xperia device they did this, the price is independent of strong dollar. I dont know how they did it, but i like it.

 

[goonergaz]

Sony nearly killed the PS3 with price they did killed the Vita with price however they hit the nail on the head with PS4...let's hope...but either way I think I'd rather get PSVR than a 2nd console so I'm in whatever the price. (well, not litterally but I can't imagine it'll be so much I won't buy it)

 

[scf]

Another VR project announcement. Some mystic thriller

 

[hughJ]

Hopefully general consumers are going to actually demo VR first rather than jump in with both feet expecting it to look like the trailer footage. It's easy to forget just what it means to be looking at a 960 pixel diameter circular section of a screen that's 3 inches from your eye under a 10x magnifier, something that really isn't translated at all by watching footage on TV or youtube.

 

[bunge]

Hopefully general consumers are going to actually demo VR first rather than jump in with both feet expecting it to look like the trailer footage. It's easy to forget just what it means to be looking at a 960 pixel diameter circular section of a screen that's 3 inches from your eye under a 10x magnifier, something that really isn't translated at all by watching footage on TV or youtube.

Do you not like PSVR?

 

[eastmen]

Hopefully general consumers are going to actually demo VR first rather than jump in with both feet expecting it to look like the trailer footage. It's easy to forget just what it means to be looking at a 960 pixel diameter circular section of a screen that's 3 inches from your eye under a 10x magnifier, something that really isn't translated at all by watching footage on TV or youtube.

I am sure at the very least Oculus will have demo units at some places. The gear vr was at best buy.

Perhaps sony will do kiosks in major malls across the states like they did with the vita

 

[hughJ]

Do you not like PSVR?

It's not that I dislike any of this generation's HMDs, more so that I recognize what they are and what they aren't. What VR buys you right now is a tangible sense of space, but it does so at the cost of perceived resolution. This is a problem for marketing because it's very difficult to convey the former, and incredibly tempting to gloss over the latter. To give an example: at ~11 pixels/degree you're looking at an angular pixel resolution akin to having your eyes 10.9 inches away from a 50" 1080p TV. There will absolutely be people who are annoyed by that resolution and particularly so for games like Gran Turismo where the focus of gameplay is not in a region that's near the user, but at the next turn's apex 20-100m away where objects will be composed of very few pixels. The scary thing is that despite how lacking the resolution is, once you've tried these sorts of cockpit games in VR it becomes very difficult to go back to playing them on a TV - neither experience leaves you completely satisfied.

This segues back to my previous belabored point regarding PSVR's longevity as a platform amidst a sea of VR platforms that will be continually leapfrogging each other year after year for the foreseeable future. PSVR will function excellently as a sign of what's to come, but I'm legitimately curious how the value conscious console userbase will react to being sold a technology that's undeniably not ready for a ~5 year platform commitment.

 

[MrFox]

But psvr is not a rectilinear projection, I thought that was the goal of these optics, to have more density in the center. Do we have numbers about morpheus for the magnification at the center?

I am more worried about whether they'll find a way to render the center with a high AA at full resolution without wasting most processing power on the periphery before warping the image.

Analysts predictions are hilariously all over the place... They vary from 0.5 million to 5 million unit for each of the big three in 2016. At one point Oculus said they expected a conservative 1 million first year but this must have changed.

 

[hughJ]

The purpose of the optics is to provide a magnification to both increase the FOV and allow the panel to appear in focus. The resulting pincushion distortion that we've seen from all the lenses used in VR is a side effect of having to use simple single element optics due to size and cost. If an appropriately sized rectilinear ultra wide angle lens system were possible to manufacture then we would probably see that being implemented as it would allow them to bypass most of the current VR render pipeline and things would be a whole lot simpler.

Abrash commented on some of this at his dev days talk a couple years ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo&t=17m18s

Also remember there are limits to what you can do with biasing the sampling distribution of the pre-warp buffer. You can't sample too conservatively because the amount of post-raster reprojection being applied isn't fully known at the time of rendering, so the center of the buffer that you supersample will never be the actual center of the final output. This is going to be a much bigger problem when it comes time to do proper foveated rendering, but I suspect by that point we'll see a more flexible and robust compositing setup and the current full framebuffer reprojection approach will be retired.

The sales prediction stuff... it's really difficult to tell. The only real concrete numbers to give guidance here is from the couple hundred thousand devkits sold over the last two and a half years. Considering that they've probably been doubling or tripling their install base year over year despite saying it's not a product for consumers, has sparse software support, and a looming consumer release is well known, there's definitely fuel there for being overly optimistic. I think the most interesting question is not in the number of VR HMD sales, but rather customer satisfaction and retention in order to maintain positive word of mouth and willingness to upgrade. In that sense I actually think there's such a thing as selling too much next year, at least on the PC side of things. There may well be 10 million people out there willing to part with $400 due to the hype, but I suspect that a big chunk of that wouldn't become weekly users and might skip the next iteration. On top of that you have the real question of whether Oculus and Valve/HTC are even ready to ship and support those types of numbers.

 

[Arwin]

Btw, watching photos on VR is quite nice. Especially panorama shots can be wrapped around you similarly to how you shot them originally, making it more like you are there when you watch them and with everything basically life sized. Pretty cool, and one of many effects that I think outweigh the loss of pixel density. Same for when we watched a 360 degree high quality video in VR - being there like that has quite a big impact.

 

[hughJ]

Photos and video do have the benefit though of generally being a much higher source resolution than the panel itself, so you've got a very supersampled image being displayed across the field of view. It's a big part of why I think for some content mobile phone holder VR is going to make PSVR/Rift/Vive look pretty lack luster as 1440p and 4K will become more common in that space over the next year.

 

[MrFox]

I still think it's a mistake to compare mobile with consoles. Mobile users don't want to pay for quality content, they play free stuff and some get sucked into micro transaction. That's the market and that's why vita failed. Console users generate much more revenue per user base. If the psvr platform doesn't convince gamers to spend on games it will fail. Mobile remains in it's own microcosm.

 

[hughJ]

I'm not suggesting that the platforms are competing directly with each other in the sense that people will opt to go with mobile VR over PSVR, I'm talking about the general public perception of VR as a technology when a $20 piece a cardboard wrapped around their smartphone looks dramatically cleaner than their $400 PSVR. That reaction is the same problem we have when folks first try these HMDs having come from a daily barrage of near retina-level TVs and smartphones, and it's something you hear about from time to time when folks have been exposed to GearVR or cardboard before having tried DK1 or DK2. How people will accept PSVR/Rift/Vive has a lot to do with managing their initial expectations and the mobile phone market is going to make that increasingly difficult as time goes on.

 

[MrFox]

I'm not seeing this. It never really mattered that smartphones could display candy crush at much higher resolution than The Last of Us on PS3, so why would it be different? PS2 was stuck at 480i in 2005 and games were horribly blurry with aliasing. Gamers were fully aware of the compromises. The much better graphics on PC didn't make it increasingly difficult to manage their expectations for the 7 years old PS3 for TLoU either. 2016 however is already mid-gen so it's an important mitigating aspect. Upgrading takes money whether it's a $600 smartphone, or a $400 console, or a $1000 PC.

Each platform will have specific experiences and apps which will maximize their respective capabilities, photo apps might be increasingly better on smartphones as people upgrade. But where they are not competing, they are not compared.

 

[DieH@rd]

What can we extrapolate the price of the external Processing Unit now that we know it is used in addition of video stream splitting also for "heavy lifting processing" of the 3D audio?

 

[eastmen]

What can we extrapolate the price of the external Processing Unit now that we know it is used in addition of video stream splitting also for "heavy lifting processing" of the 3D audio?

The ps4 has the same dsp in it that the r9 290s use for audio, I believe that is stil lbeing used for sound



So 30 and 60 fps is not acceptable for VR ?



Looks like sony still wants 90 hz like the rift and vive


The break out box is also larger than I thought it would be .