It’s still early days in the VR game, and only two companies stand ahead of the pack, ready to put a virtual reality kit in the house of every American: Sony and Oculus, now owned by Facebook. We sat down with the heads of VR at both companies to talk about turning Virtual Reality into everyday reality.
Shuhei Yoshida, president of Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, was part of the team that brought the original Sony Playstation to life. His first games gave players a glimpse of farflung environments, from Gran Turismo’s Nürburgring raceway to Final Fantasy VII’s dystopian universe. Twenty years later, Yoshida is defining the next age of gaming with Project Morpheus, Sony’s new virtual reality headset. Yoshida recently took a few minutes to explain what that future might resemble.
Question: Were you scared?
Yoshida: Once you try it, somehow everybody forgets that there are other people around you. People start to talk very loud. You forget about being seen by other people.
Q: What will it take to actually get Morpheus into people’s homes?
Yoshida: The first thing we strongly believe, and Oculus says the same thing, is that we need to deliver the core technology first. We want to make the technology before we bring it to market. The product we have we’re pretty happy with, but there are many areas we can improve on to bring it to an even higher level. And the technology advances every month.
But we also have to nail it from a system-development standpoint. People don’t buy hardware just to have hardware. It needs strong content. Every developer who has started working on VR learns that they have to relearn what they have learned over the years making games. A lot of tech and new assets can be used again, but the approach has to be pretty different.
You’re building a location-based environment, so the experience has to be good. If the games or apps are designed poorly, it makes people sick, which is a really, really bad thing to have as an introduction. We have to work hard to share the knowledge that we have gained.
And finally, the product has to be affordable. All three categories have to work.
Q: Sony’s philosophy behind Project Morpheus is "VR is a medium, not a peripheral." What does that mean?
Yoshida: When you talk about VR, I liken it to 3D graphics technology. When we introduced the Playstation, it was a revolution in terms of 3D graphics. It was in the hands of all game developers to deliver 3D games to your home instead of to the arcade. The 3D graphics card had a huge impact, but developers are still learning how to use it in games like Grand Theft Auto or The Last Of Us, 20 years after the launch of PS1.
3D graphics are now used everywhere: on the web, in movies, and even in the anime industry. Nobody would’ve conceived of 3D anime before. In a similar way, VR can be way too many different things. Once it becomes very affordable to bring to millions of people, more uses will be created. What I’m really excited about is that VR puts you in the scene. You can be a witness to some great event, historical, dramatic — it’s going to be a powerful medium to bring storytelling to.
Q: What will the killer app be for Morpheus?
Yoshida: A sense of presence is something that only VR can bring to the market, an experience that gives you a really strong sense of presence somewhere else. That somewhere else has to be really attractive to you, so you want to go back to that space again and again. That will be the killer app for that platform.
I spent three months with a backpack in Europe going from one city to another. That was a great experience, but it’s really hard to do getting older—you don’t have the time or money. Well, I have more money now but I don’t have time [laughs]. You get to be someplace and an accident might happen, but in VR you can set a perfect location. It could be a fantastic space like Star Wars or Game of Thrones, or another place you want to immerse yourself in. An anime IP in Japan would be attractive to a Japanese audience — the place that you want to come back to will be different for different people.
Q: How big a priority is Morpheus for Sony? Is this a product that’s going to be around for the next 20 years?
Yoshida: For Sony Computer Entertainment, VR and Morpheus is one of the areas we are very excited about, like cloud gaming with PS now, or other networked services. We’re really focused on bringing that experience to consumers.
Q: Are we ever going to see big games on Morpheus, from Hideo Kojima [the creator of the Metal Gear series] or any others?
Yoshida: That would be awesome. Kojima-san has always liked gadgets. He always has some future vision for some gadgets.
Have you played the Destiny beta? Half of the time I was just hiding out in the Tower, just chilling, looking at the great vista. That would be great in a VR setup.
Q: Will we have to simulate all of our senses for VR to be truly great? Is it about more than just sight?
Yoshida: I believe that 3D sound is an essential part of creating a sense of presence. This is the safest way to avoid technical problems. Without 3D sound it’s very easy to break the immersion. When you see an object to your left, you want to hear the sound that the object creates from your left. So we designed a system to handle all the work of creating 3D sound so that game developers can pretty easily map sounds in the 3D space.
Each sound source has 3D location data so that for every frame, the proper sound is computed to your left ear and right ear. That’s part of Morpheus, and we believe having 3D sound is essential.
Other [inputs] like interaction — one of the really strong experiences is when you see your arm, and when you hold a gun or a sword and you flick your wrist and see it in the VR space. In the meantime, the Dual Shock 4 has LEDs so the controller’s position can also be tracked by Playstation Camera, like PS Move. It’s not good for holding a sword, but when game designers design a mechanism like you’re in a cockpit, you can create a pretty strong sense of immersion. One of the people who tried our Castle demo, instead of attacking the dummy he was trying to pat the dummy on the shoulder, or shake hands with it. He was really having a blast doing that, so we encourage those kinds of experiences too.
We used to say seeing is believing. Now we have to say experiencing is believing.
Shuhei Yoshida, president of Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, was part of the team that brought the original Sony Playstation to life. His first games gave players a glimpse of farflung environments, from Gran Turismo’s Nürburgring raceway to Final Fantasy VII’s dystopian universe. Twenty years later, Yoshida is defining the next age of gaming with Project Morpheus, Sony’s new virtual reality headset. Yoshida recently took a few minutes to explain what that future might resemble.
Question: Were you scared?
Yoshida: Once you try it, somehow everybody forgets that there are other people around you. People start to talk very loud. You forget about being seen by other people.
Q: What will it take to actually get Morpheus into people’s homes?
Yoshida: The first thing we strongly believe, and Oculus says the same thing, is that we need to deliver the core technology first. We want to make the technology before we bring it to market. The product we have we’re pretty happy with, but there are many areas we can improve on to bring it to an even higher level. And the technology advances every month.
But we also have to nail it from a system-development standpoint. People don’t buy hardware just to have hardware. It needs strong content. Every developer who has started working on VR learns that they have to relearn what they have learned over the years making games. A lot of tech and new assets can be used again, but the approach has to be pretty different.
You’re building a location-based environment, so the experience has to be good. If the games or apps are designed poorly, it makes people sick, which is a really, really bad thing to have as an introduction. We have to work hard to share the knowledge that we have gained.
And finally, the product has to be affordable. All three categories have to work.
Q: Sony’s philosophy behind Project Morpheus is "VR is a medium, not a peripheral." What does that mean?
Yoshida: When you talk about VR, I liken it to 3D graphics technology. When we introduced the Playstation, it was a revolution in terms of 3D graphics. It was in the hands of all game developers to deliver 3D games to your home instead of to the arcade. The 3D graphics card had a huge impact, but developers are still learning how to use it in games like Grand Theft Auto or The Last Of Us, 20 years after the launch of PS1.
3D graphics are now used everywhere: on the web, in movies, and even in the anime industry. Nobody would’ve conceived of 3D anime before. In a similar way, VR can be way too many different things. Once it becomes very affordable to bring to millions of people, more uses will be created. What I’m really excited about is that VR puts you in the scene. You can be a witness to some great event, historical, dramatic — it’s going to be a powerful medium to bring storytelling to.
Q: What will the killer app be for Morpheus?
Yoshida: A sense of presence is something that only VR can bring to the market, an experience that gives you a really strong sense of presence somewhere else. That somewhere else has to be really attractive to you, so you want to go back to that space again and again. That will be the killer app for that platform.
I spent three months with a backpack in Europe going from one city to another. That was a great experience, but it’s really hard to do getting older—you don’t have the time or money. Well, I have more money now but I don’t have time [laughs]. You get to be someplace and an accident might happen, but in VR you can set a perfect location. It could be a fantastic space like Star Wars or Game of Thrones, or another place you want to immerse yourself in. An anime IP in Japan would be attractive to a Japanese audience — the place that you want to come back to will be different for different people.
Q: How big a priority is Morpheus for Sony? Is this a product that’s going to be around for the next 20 years?
Yoshida: For Sony Computer Entertainment, VR and Morpheus is one of the areas we are very excited about, like cloud gaming with PS now, or other networked services. We’re really focused on bringing that experience to consumers.
Q: Are we ever going to see big games on Morpheus, from Hideo Kojima [the creator of the Metal Gear series] or any others?
Yoshida: That would be awesome. Kojima-san has always liked gadgets. He always has some future vision for some gadgets.
Have you played the Destiny beta? Half of the time I was just hiding out in the Tower, just chilling, looking at the great vista. That would be great in a VR setup.
Q: Will we have to simulate all of our senses for VR to be truly great? Is it about more than just sight?
Yoshida: I believe that 3D sound is an essential part of creating a sense of presence. This is the safest way to avoid technical problems. Without 3D sound it’s very easy to break the immersion. When you see an object to your left, you want to hear the sound that the object creates from your left. So we designed a system to handle all the work of creating 3D sound so that game developers can pretty easily map sounds in the 3D space.
Each sound source has 3D location data so that for every frame, the proper sound is computed to your left ear and right ear. That’s part of Morpheus, and we believe having 3D sound is essential.
Other [inputs] like interaction — one of the really strong experiences is when you see your arm, and when you hold a gun or a sword and you flick your wrist and see it in the VR space. In the meantime, the Dual Shock 4 has LEDs so the controller’s position can also be tracked by Playstation Camera, like PS Move. It’s not good for holding a sword, but when game designers design a mechanism like you’re in a cockpit, you can create a pretty strong sense of immersion. One of the people who tried our Castle demo, instead of attacking the dummy he was trying to pat the dummy on the shoulder, or shake hands with it. He was really having a blast doing that, so we encourage those kinds of experiences too.
We used to say seeing is believing. Now we have to say experiencing is believing.
