16085757124_6bdd16f864_kSAN FRANCISCO – It has been a year since Sony first unveiled its Project Morpheus virtual reality headset at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and in that time the Japanese game giant has gone back and made significant updates to its hardware to improve its performance. Chris Norden, a senior staff engineer at Sony Computer Entertainment, told an audience of developers at Moscone West today about what the company has in store.

The second generation of the Morpheus hardware features a custom 5.7 inch OLED display with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and a 120 Hz refresh rate. It uses a custom pixel arrangement designed around the human eye to put more pixels in the center of each frame, and fewer pixels around the edges to provide greater detail on an area that people usually focus on and less detail along the periphery of their vision. The screen also features lower pixel persistence to reduce blur and flickering images.

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The optical block, which holds Morpheus’s screen, can be slid forward and backwards, making the experience more comfortable for glasses wearers and people with long heads. Developers who want to step out from the VR environment can pull it away and look around the screen to get a quick glimpse at code they’re working on, or peek at their phone.

On top of all the upgrades to the headgear, the software development kit powering Morpheus got an upgrade. Now, all of the objects a developer can track (the Morpheus headset, a DualShock 4 controller and PlayStation Move headset) can be referenced in their code using the same coordinate system and a single function call. That will make it simpler for developers to build experiences for the VR environment that use a bunch of different peripherals, something that could help them create a richer experience.

Chris Norden
Chris Norden

People who are spectating someone using Morpheus will be able to see what that person sees using the headgear’s processing unit that provides a “Social Screen” rendering of the VR scene in two dimensions on a television set.

Even with all the upgrades, it will be a while until consumers can get their hands on a Morpheus headset for themselves. Norden said the company is aiming to release Morpheus in the first half of 2016.

“We’re not going to release this product before it’s ready because it’s going to be detrimental to the entire VR community,” he said.

Sony wants to take the additional time to make Morpheus the best product that it can be so that it doesn’t poison the well for users’ interest in virtual reality. One bad experience could be enough to turn people off of the trying VR again, and lead to the demise of the burgeoning VR ecosystem.

That wait means that Sony will likely be a bit behind some of its competitors. Valve’s “Vive” virtual reality headset for its SteamVR platform is supposed to be out by the end of this year.

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