E3 2014: Project Morpheus vs Oculus Rift

We try on Sony's new headset to see if VR is something that your PS4 needs.

One of the cooler things I got to check out at E3 this year was Project Morpheus, the Sony-created headset that will supposedly in the future plug into your PS4. I’ve been doodling with headsets for a while, namely with the Oculus Rift and Sony’s previous home-cinema headset thing, but this was my first chance to check out Morpheus in action.

The headset looks a lot sleeker and nicer than the Oculus Rift – compared to having a large black box strapped to your face, Morpheus looks a lot more elegant and futuristic. It also felt more comfortable to wear, with the device distributing pressure around my head and to the back of my neck, rather than on the front of my face. Once I strapped it on, I was able to manually adjust everything until I got a clearer image. One great thing was that the device had no problem sitting over my glasses, which for me is a crucial thing.

The demo I was experiencing was Street Luge, where I had to lie down on a bean bag and tilt my head left and right. In the game I was essentially racing down a slope in between cars, trying to avoid getting injured. It was a pretty great experience, with my field of view being completely enveloped by the game. It was a tad bit nauseating due to the speed at which everything was flying by, but it was still a great thrill and felt like the cars were really right there in front of me.

Post-demo, I hopped downstairs to the Oculus Rift booth to try on their updated headsets as well. The difference between the Rift and Morpheus is that the Rift features a slightly larger degree of field of view, along with OLED screens (Morpheus uses LCD). Both run at 1080p resolutions, but are tied down to specific platforms – Rift with the PC and Morpheus with the PS4.

The interesting question to ask is what does Sony have planned for Project Morpheus? Running a PS4 game using Morpheus would require a fair bit of processing power, and technical experts comment that it’s highly unlikely that PS4 games would be able to run natively using Project Morpheus. And since the Oculus Rift has been around for a bit longer, Sony has a fair bit of catching up and polish to do with Morpheus before developers can take it out for a spin. However it’s still an exciting bit of tech to keep an eye on and is one that Sony hopes will further broaden the horizons of the PS4.