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At GDC 2014 Road to VR has learned that Sony Project Morpheus dev kits could be delivered to third-party devs as early as June this year.

A trusted source has confirmed that dev kits for Project Morpheus, Sony’s PS4 VR headset, could be delivered as early as June, one month before the expected delivery of the Oculus Rift DK2. The information came to the source directly from Sony.

Sony’s first-party developers (Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide) and some select third-party developers already had their hands on Project Morpheus. Third-party developers CCP Games and Edios Montreal in particular used Morpheus dev kits to get demos of Eve Valkyrie and Thief ready for the GDC show floor.

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For other third-party developers, it would seem that the Morpheus dev kit will become available as early as June. Photos taken by Road to VR reveal disclaimer text on the Morpheus PS4 VR headset prototype that indicates that Sony is already well on its way to certifying the developer kit for large scale distribution. It isn’t clear at this point how Sony will decide which developers can get access to the Morpheus developer kit.

Sony Morpheus Demos Running on PC and PS4 Dev Kits at GDC 2014

sony-morpheus-ps4-vr-headset-developer-kitThe question of whether or not PS4 has the computing power necessary for a good VR experience has been in the air ever since the Sony VR rumors appeared. It was assumed, since the units powering the VR experiences were hidden away in cabinets, that everything was running on beefy PCs.

Road to VR confirmed with Sony that some of the demos were running on PC (Eve Valkyrie and Thief) and some were running on the PS4 dev kit (The Deep, The Castle). It was surprising that Sony kept the units hidden away, as it could have instilled confidence in the power of the PS4 had they been shown running some of the experiences natively.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Don Gateley

    You can bet that their developer program will be much more restricted than Oculus’ come and get it approach.

    It’s great that they were running from a PC because it means that it can run from a PC. After putting a bump on PS4 sales by giving it the first benefit I’d be surprised if there weren’t a PC version coming to tap into the market Oculus is creating which is ultimately bound to be bigger than the console market as non-gaming entertainment moves it into the mainstream.

    I’m still waiting for someone at RtVR to give a comparison between the images seen on the Morpheus and the Oculus DK2. Has no one seen both?

    • Ben Lang

      Yup, Brian, Bruce, and I all saw both the DK2 and Morpheus. Problem is that without spending significant time in them it’s hard to give a good objective comparison. The Rift certainly has more screen door, but it’s way sharper thanks to the low persistence display. FoV was comparable between the two.

      • Gabriel

        And what about pixels, resolution? and some comparison with DK1, more detailed? Sorry, but all about this things was just evasive, nothing clear about screen quality… i think this is more important with this headsets, the display, there si the key. Thanks!

        • Psuedonymous

          Neither Sony or Oculus are going to let anyone take two two headsets away and compare them objectively at GDC. They aren’t even going to let anyone place a camera to the lenses to get pictures to compare after-the-fact (because it would be way to easy to not produce the same conditions for each and draw incorrect conclusions). Until hardware for both are available next to each other to do proper comparative testing, the ONLY comparisons possible are subjective personable impressions.

          There’s only so much you can say when comparing the two requires trekking across a building and waiting in line for quite some time in between samples.

      • Don Gateley

        Well, I can bet that you guys have a DK2 on order and will have a Morpheus as soon as it is remotely possible so I guess we’ll just have too wait ’till then.

        What I can deduce from what little has been said about direct comparison is that they are pretty much equivalent with respect to image quality because if they weren’t that would have stood out and been noticed.

    • Pontianak

      While seeing the Sony VR HMD run demos on the PC is good for the thought that eventually they will let consumers run their HMD on the PC, as they are making this for the PS4, it kinda has made me leery about how viable the PS4 platform is going to be for VR. There have been concerns about the PS4 not being properly up to snuff for proper VR, and the fact they had demos on PC isn’t good to set aside those fears…