While many developers and consumers found the recent purchase of Oculus Rift by Facebook to be a complete travesty, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida looks at it differently. Speaking to Engadget, Yoshida feels that for a company like Facebook to see the potential of VR serves as validation for the technology in the real world.
“We meant to validate Oculus by announcing Project Morpheus, and the Oculus guys knew what we were working on. I think they were waiting for us to make the announcement, so it would be Sony and Oculus together, but now Oculus being acquired by Facebook is helping to validate our efforts. More people will know about VR.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s interest in VR could make it the “next big platform after mobile” to Yoshida and in the coming days, he hopes there will be collaborations between creators to for knowledge sharing purposes.
“Those early prototypes had larger latency and positional tracking and may not have worked as well. I feel really sorry for people developing VR stuff. They have to test it. With the [Project Morpheus] kit we have now, what we demonstrated at GDC, I think its the first time we can really provide developers with something and say, you can use ours, and you’ll be alright.
“We need to share knowledge. We can’t just make the hardware, it’s the game applications that need to be designed well. We need time for developers to experiment and find the killer application, and at the same time we need to learn how VR applications should be designed.”
As of now, Project Morpheus still has no fixed release date and will be compatible with the PS4, PS Eye and PS Move. Oculus VR will release Rift SDK 2 this June with a commercial release date to be announced soon.