At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Sony has announced the next generation of their virtual reality headset, Project Morpheus.
Now dubbed the PlayStation 4 VR headset, the new unit features under-the-hood improvements such as an OLED display capable of a 120Hz refresh rate. Shuhei Yoshida says that games rendered at 120 frames-per-second are ideal for VR, though our thought lingers on whether that is realistic in a world where 60 frames-per-second is a difficult task.
Fortunately, the PlayStation 4 was originally designed to support 120 frames-per-second, a detail we’re just learning about a year and a half after the console’s original launch.
Externally, there are three more motion-tracking LEDs (bringing the total to nine) to provide better accuracy in head-movement. The latency has also been reduced by half, down to a ridiculously fast 18 milliseconds. For context, that is equivalent to about 55 frames-per-second. Most games run between 30 and 60 frames-per-second, and that’s on a TV. In your living room. Staying still.
The design of the headset hasn’t changed much, though the cushion on top appears to have been reduced in size. We’re not able to try out the hands-on here at GDC this week, but we expect to have a full roundup of the hardware and the demo software Sony shows off at E3 in just a few short months.
Sony has said that the PlayStation 4 VR Headset will launch in the first half of 2016.