[caption id="attachment_10574" align="aligncenter" width="700"] An early Sony Morpheus prototype with three Move-like tracking spheres.[/caption] At Gamescom 2014, Road to VR Editor Paul James got to sit down with Anton Mikhailov who works in Sony's 'Magic Lab', an R&D division tasked with creating innovative experiences for PlayStation. Mikhailov revealed that the company has had prototypes of the Morpheus VR headset for a year and a half prior to revealing the public developer kit at GDC 2014 back in March. He further expounds on his work on Morpheus' vision tracking and Sony's desire to create a calibration-optional experience. [caption id="attachment_10572" align="alignright" width="325"] March, 2014: The very first moment that the public saw Project Morpheus, Sony's VR headset for the PlayStation 4.[/caption] One of the biggest questions surrounding Sony's reveal of Project Morpheus, the company's VR headset for the PlayStation 4, was when they caught on to the idea. Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey is the first to admit that the Oculus Rift DK1's hardware is not the result of any proprietary technological breakthroughs, just the compilation of the right components at the right price. Any big consumer electronics manufacturer had the resources to do what Oculus did. But it took the collective effort of a few thousand developers, enthusiasts, and gamers to get the ball rolling with the 2012 Oculus Rift Kickstarter. So why didn't a company like Sony make the move that Oculus did at the time? A major reason seems to be the perceived risk involved. Many companies were jaded after VR of the early 90's didn't deliver. Without any apparent breakthroughs, there didn't seem to be much to gain. The Oculus Rift Kickstarter clearly changed all of that and the big guys quickly started paying attention, especially as Oculus raised several successive rounds of investment, numbering in the 10's of millions, leading up to the company's acquisition by Facebook. See Also: Thoughts On Sony’s Project Morpheus "...before [GDC]… probably for about a year and a half we've actually had people working on it in some capacity." In an interview with Road to VR at last week's Gamescom conference, Anton Mikhailov sheds some light on when Sony realized that VR could be the next big thing... it's early than you might expect. "...we’ve had dev kits for quite a while now, like very low volume internal dev kits. The first public dev kit was announced at GDC so after that we opened up to more developers." Mickhailov said. "But before that… probably for about a year and a half we’ve actually had people working on it in some capacity." He goes on to reiterate that Sony is still officially calling Morpheus a 'prototype'. A year and a half prior to GDC 2014 (March) puts us all the way back to September 2012, right at the end of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter, perhaps making Sony one of the first big consumer electronics companies to get serious about modern VR. A note, tweeted from Oculus CTO John Carmack after Sony revealed Morpheus, seems to corroborate the timing: Trivia: I had suggested to Sony that they try to hire Palmer Luckey before the Oculus kick starter. — John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 19, 2014 That's not to say that Sony doesn't have experience in the realm. Sony has been making head mounted displays long before the Oculus Rift Kickstarter was a spark of an idea in Luckey's mind. One of the company's earliest HMD's was the Sony Visotron, made back in 1993. But of course, the Rift makes the leap from 'head mounted display' to 'VR headset', the latter including the vital wide field of view and low latency head tracking that make for a true virtual reality experience—not to mention a consumer price point. Continue Reading on Page 2... No Consumer Version in 2014; a Calibration-optional Experience When It Arrives With regards to a Project Morpheus release date for the PS4, Sony so far has only confirmed that it won't be happening in 2014. "...past that, I'm not sure what the schedule is," Mikhailov said. "...a big part of the console experience is that it just works, and that's what we want to do." When it does hit, the company wants it to be easy to use. "...a big part of the console experience is that it just works, and that's what we want to do," said Mikhailov. "Currently there isn’t [calibration] right now; we've really focused on making sure the headsets work, essentially of the box—in our perspective essentially out of the factory—in the factory there’s a calibration process and then we don't want the user to have to get home and then first thing you do is [a complicated calibration process]... The Morpheus actually supports a very wide range of IPDs for your optics, so it shouldn't be an optical issue... we’re not planning to have adjustable optics for example. On the software side, to render the game, it does help if you can render it at the user’s correct IPD. Currently we're using an average IPD of I think 63.5mm..." Although the company wants the out-of-the-box experience to be simple, there may be room for optional calibration for advanced users to enhance the experience. "There’s methods to do [IPD calibration in the headset], so I think that’s something that advanced users can do because I think the majority of people will actually be ok with an average IPD... but if you can go into your profile and say ‘hey I want to improve my experience’ then [the system] can say ‘tell me something about yourself’ like ‘let’s do this eye thing and we'll store it in your profile’ and it'll be better from then on," said Mikhailov. "There’s a few other things like that... if we can know your arm length we can make the skeleton tracking better… stuff like that, we can auto-calibrate a lot of it on the fly to a first approximation and that’s quite good for the general audience, but if you really want to get super tight, then yeah, some user-calibration could help." PlayStation 4 Camera as a Single Vision Source for Multiple Inputs "...if you ever use a system that has different tracking for head and hands it's actually non-trivial to line the two systems up..." Although the PlayStation 4 camera preceded Morpheus, Sony is betting that it is the ideal system for VR input. "I think the big advantage of that system is that it allows us to track the Move [motion controller] and the Dual-Shock 4 [PlayStation 4 controller] and the HMD all from the same viewpoint and that’s actually quite important because if you ever use a system that has different tracking for head and hands it's actually non-trivial to line the two systems up, so you can't ever quite get that feeling that you're hands are in the right place," Mikhailov said. "To get it right you need to start calibrating the two systems which is quite a technical feat and not something we want to put our users through. So I think there’s a lot of advantages to using the standard PS4 camera to track the Dual-Shock 4, the standard Move controller, and the HMD, just kind of put them all in the same camera space." When asked whether or not Sony seeings themselves with tracking fidelity down to the limbs or fingers in the near future, Mikhailov notes that the camera technology is not quite ready and that having buttons and something in your hand is still good for game design. "I mean [limb and finger tracking] is interesting but as a technology person I can tell you it’s really difficult... the cameras right now are just really not at a level where you can get that sort of fine-level control," he said. "...buttons are still quite nice because when you have to hit a menu or switch weapons its quite nice to have a button… and even just holding something is good, so if you have a [virtual] racquet or sword you want to feel like you're holding something, not just waving in the air..." Our thanks to Anton Mikhailov for taking the time to speak to us. It's great to see Sony allowing its engineers the freedom to discuss Project Morpheus' gestation and development with such openness. Morpheus is a promising piece of VR technology that has the potential to open VR to audiences that Oculus won't be able to cater for in the near future. We look forward to seeing how it evolves.