Sony Project Morpheus Dev Kits to be Delivered as Early as June

At GDC 2014 Road to VR has learned that Sony Project Morpheus dev kits could be delivered to third-party devs as early as June this year.

A trusted source has confirmed that dev kits for Project Morpheus, Sony’s PS4 VR headset, could be delivered as early as June, one month before the expected delivery of the Oculus Rift DK2. The information came to the source directly from Sony.

Sony’s first-party developers (Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide) and some select third-party developers already had their hands on Project Morpheus. Third-party developers CCP Games and Edios Montreal in particular used Morpheus dev kits to get demos of Eve Valkyrie and Thief ready for the GDC show floor.

For other third-party developers, it would seem that the Morpheus dev kit will become available as early as June. Photos taken by Road to VR reveal disclaimer text on the Morpheus PS4 VR headset prototype that indicates that Sony is already well on its way to certifying the developer kit for large scale distribution. It isn’t clear at this point how Sony will decide which developers can get access to the Morpheus developer kit.

Sony Morpheus Demos Running on PC and PS4 Dev Kits at GDC 2014

The question of whether or not PS4 has the computing power necessary for a good VR experience has been in the air ever since the Sony VR rumors appeared. It was assumed, since the units powering the VR experiences were hidden away in cabinets, that everything was running on beefy PCs.

Road to VR confirmed with Sony that some of the demos were running on PC (Eve Valkyrie and Thief) and some were running on the PS4 dev kit (The Deep, The Castle). It was surprising that Sony kept the units hidden away, as it could have instilled confidence in the power of the PS4 had they been shown running some of the experiences natively.