There’s word emerging today of a Virtual Reality revival coming straight outta Sony – with photos of a new headset and word from the company’s Worldwide Senior Director telling the gaming mag Develop that work is underway to develop VR on “a couple of games”.
Virtual Reality (VR) has virtually become a fad in tech history. Kick starting back in the early 90s, there was even a movie based around it called “The Lawnmower Man” which starred future Bond, Pierce Brosnan.
Wearing a bulky headset with “wrap-around” visor which surrounds the field of vision a user could become fully-immersed in a three-dimensional computer generated environment. The uses of VR ranged from gaming to training purposes and objects or environments features could be interacted with using a wired glove and additional peripherals.
Virtual Reality had its very brief day in the gaming market with Sega leading the charge back with Sega VR back in 1993 and its influence is still somewhat present now.
Just think of some of those gaming gadgets we use today. The closest we have would have to be the motion controller Kinect for Xbox, and to some extent Sony’s own Playstation Move. But these are environments played out on a flat screen. The reintroduction of a headset, along with modern advances in 3D tech proves a very interesting prospect indeed.
Sony Worldwide’s Mike Hocking says “We’ve now got the power to do it, we’ve got the screen resolution to do it, we’ve got the processing power to update fast enough so that we can have very, very immersive experiences on head-mounted displays in gaming in the not too distant future”.
The first games in development are said to be first-person shooters and Hocking adds “Being in a virtual world where I can see my virtual hands or a virtual gun, with all the things we can do in the gaming world, is going to be absolutely amazing”.
With rumours of a “Kinect-style” motion control system coming with Sony’s Playstation 4, can we expect both the motion control and Virtual Reality developments to be in the works complimenting one another? We have to admit the two go together like hand-in-glove.
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Source: Develop