Sony officially rebranded Project Morpheus as PlayStation VR, saying goodbye to the name of the Greek god of dreams and Laurence Fishburne’s character in The Matrix.
At the Tokyo Game Show in Japan the company also revealed some of its planned titles for the PlayStation-powered VR system, including Final Fantasy XIV Online, mech-combat game RIGS and The Playroom VR. Sony already rebranded the accessory PlayStation VR on the official site, along with what should be confirmation of previously reported specs. PlayStation VR features a 5.7 inch OLED screen inside the headset with 1920×1080 resolution and games that can be rendered at 120 frames per second with latency of less than 18 milliseconds. You can watch the portion of the announcement regarding VR in the video below. It occurs 1 hour and 45 minutes into the presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0P6eD5Kw1U&t=105m55s
One of the key features of PlayStation VR is its ability to display a scene for a person in VR while also showing a scene to people playing on a traditional TV, allowing for cooperative or competitive gameplay. The gameplay possibilities can best be seen in The PlayRoom VR/Monster Escape, which is a 4 versus 1 game where one person in VR uses their head to dodge objects thrown by up to four players who are watching the game on a traditional TV. Check it out here:
We’ve reached out to Sony to confirm any additional details we can, including which of the announced titles will be released with the U.S. launch of PlayStation VR. Sony has a close relationship with the people at Oculus and it will be interesting to see if that could lead to cross-platform support of some titles.
The PlayStation VR add-on for the PlayStation 4 is slated for release in 2016. However, the consumer availability and price of PlayStation VR, as well as the Vive and Rift, is still relatively unknown. We know they are all targeted to launch in the first half of the year but VR is an entirely new paradigm in entertainment and Sony, Oculus and HTC must deal with a lot of complexity to accomplish a global launch while supplying this new hardware and ironing out software.
