Another of our most anticipated stops during Gamescom was the stand where Sony was showing Project Morpheus. After having heard totally contrary opinions about the HDM prototype for PS4, there is nothing like trying it out for ourselves to form our own opinion, which has been much more positive than we expected.
The Morpheus booth contained three demos: the one we were able to try was that of the medieval knight, in which we used PS Move to handle the hands of our avatar. In another of the demos the player slides at full speed along a road bypassing vehicles, said demo was handled only with the movement of our head. Finally, the third demo takes place inside an underwater cage, and we will suffer the attack of a shark. For this demo the standard PS4 controller was used, with which it was possible to move around the cage and shoot the shark.
It was not allowed to photograph the inside of the HMD, but we were able to take this photograph from afar in which you can see the large lenses and the fastening system, with a wheel that allows you to adjust it to our head. The Morpheus finishes exude a great quality, and give more of a final product feeling than a DK2, although it is also a prototype.
What we don’t know is the contents of this huge control box, which is used to connect Morpheus to the PS4. While Oculus has eliminated it with the move from the DK1 to the DK2, Sony needs it to be able to connect Morpheus to the console… or the PC, which although in principle it will not have official support, Sony has used it on other occasions, when it showed Morpheus with EVE Valkyrie at other events.
The summary of our sensations: very comfortable, a somewhat lower FOV than Oculus Rift, especially the vertical one, a lower grid effect than in the DK2, and a blur effect that reminds us of the Oculus DK1. The PS Move controllers respond quite well, although when we approach the crossbow to the face, as you can see in the video, it seems that the positioning is somewhat unstable and it can be seen that the crossbow shakes a little. The demos of the knight and the road worked perfectly, while the one of the shark had the odd drop in frames per second (we didn’t test the latter, but we saw it on the televisions that showed the image). In any case, our first contact with Morpheus has left us all with a very good taste in our mouths, and we hope that it will continue to evolve, since it can play a fundamental role when it comes to bringing virtual reality to the masses, hand in hand with PlayStation 4.
