Sony announces Project Morpheus, their VR future for the PlayStation brand

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Revealed tonight at GDC

You knew it was coming, and today during their GDC Future of Innovation talk they made it official. A virtual reality future for the PlayStation brand was revealed by Sony bosses to a completely packed panel room this evening. Shuhei Yoshida, President of Worldwide Studios at Sony, joked that the audience has “no idea what we’re going to talk about.”

Yoshida calls virtual reality the next innovation from PlayStation that will shape games as we know them. They used modified versions of their existing HMZ headset line as a test to explore VR, and after seeing the possibilities they began developing their own headset in their R&D departments years ago.

They call it Project Morpheus, a culmination of work over the last three years to realize VR for PlayStation. A prototype was unveiled during the presentation — a cool white visor that is not unlike Sony’s exisiting visor displays. This prototype is by no means final, notes Yoshida.

The plan integration with the PS Camera and PS Move in the future, with the goal of expanding the ecosystem of PS4.

Yoshida announces that the prototype will be available for testing on the show floor of GDC tomorrow. We will be there first thing tomorrow to try it out.

For early technical information, see our story on Project Morpheus’ specs.