Sony Project Morpheus going social

You will probably already know that Sony has been working on its virtual reality (VR) headset, Project Morpheus, for a while now. As Virtual Reality tends to appear like a solitary experience it seems that Oculus, being acquired by Facebook, and now Sony are looking to keep some social experiences.

Gaming probably appears to be antisocial to those not involved and even more so once you’ve strapped on your VR goggles.

Being cut off from the world around for hours at a time may, theoretically, have a negative impact on social skills so Sony is developing ‘social games’ for the PS4 headset, giving users a chance to maintain human interaction in some form or other.

SCE London Studio Director, Dave Ranyard, said:

Look at our studio history—we’ve done a lot of social games. Having that social screen is really important to us. There’s actually quite a lot you can do with that. We’ve been doing lots of companion apps as well—you can interact, you can see what they’re seeing—you can imagine that with a haunted house, and you can totally see it—the payoff is brilliant.

I am guessing that virtual meetings, virtual classrooms and the such could also be implemented.

Before we get too carried away, however, Ranyard also stated that Morpheus is still very much a prototype and that it’s too soon to say if what we’ve seen so far in demos will ever become full games:

We don’t have a date on hardware. We’re very pleased with some of the things that we’ve done, so it would be lovely to get out there to an even bigger audience than the people that just go to shows.

Shuhei Yoshida, the PlayStation head honcho, has previously stated that most of the work required to bring Morpheus to consumers has already been done – and yet we are still yet to get word of a release date.