Gadgetory

Maddi robertson with the verge at the 2014 Game Developers Conference and I'm here with project Morpheus Sony's experimental PlayStation 4 virtual reality headset so the thing I'm trying out right now is a game called or a demo called the deep it's developed by the London studio and first thing I'm noticing is that the screen is actually fantastic there's a sort of screen door effect that I've tried with earlier like oculus rift demos there's also pretty fantastic positional tracking I'm able to sort of lean over and it feels as if I'm actually looking over the side of this alright so I'm playing a build of Eve Valkyrie which is a CCP developed game that we've previously seen on the oculus rift so it's a space dogfighting game and one of the things that's interesting about it is that it uses the headset to lock-on so if I spot an enemy I can use head tracking and it'll find them and then I can fire some missiles so actually the thing that makes this so good for VR is the fact that the gaze tracking is actually totally vital so I'm playing a castle sword and punching demo basically and the thing that's unique about this compared to the other demos I've played is that it uses the Move controller the end of this demo is that you get eaten by the dragon and that's one of the things that virtual reality does really well is a sense of sort of imminence of things coming up and getting right in your face so when people talk about immersion that's really one of the things that immersion means right now I think a better field of view is also one of the things that's going to improve immersion on this right now I mean it definitely feels like you're there but it is like you're there wearing a spacesuit this was great so unfortunately I did just accidentally punch someone which may be one of the hazards with multiplayer here one of the things that's actually interesting is that you can see what the person wearing the headset is seeing obviously not in virtual reality but this opens up a lot of sort of interesting spectatorship opportunities or just asymmetrical game one person can be playing on the screen and another on project Morpheus it's not going to convey the whole experience but you'll be able to look and say oh this looks like a fun game this looks like something I want to try out for myself