Oculus Rift v Project Morpheus: Design

Anyone who's ever found themselves playing a game for hours at a time (just one more level!) will attest how important comfort is, and when you've got a headset strapped to your noggin even the slightest irritation is going to be magnified immensely. It's important, then, that both Oculus and Sony get their headsets just right, but it's a literal balancing act of packing it with technology and not making it feel like you've got an overweight sloth clinging to your face.
The Oculus Rift development kit (DK2) weighs about 440g and the new Crescent Bay prototype will bring that weight down. Although no figures have been revealed as of yet, we're promised "dramatically improved weight and ergonomics"). Oculus has also improved comfort and usability levels greatly, packing the various HDMI and USB cables into a single sheath and adding a little extra ventilation so you don't end up wearing a sweat-filled snorkel.
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Sony takes a different approach to the design, however, and it looks far sleeker in a kind of Star Trek way. It cleverly positions some of its tech in a helmet-like portion above the goggles, which means it doesn't feel like you're wearing an enormous pair of comedy glasses and it also distributes its weight in such a way that none of it is resting on the bridge of your nose or your cheeks.
The latest prototype, unveiled at GDC 2015, also moves the majority of the unit's weight from resting on the top of your head, and it's even usable when you're wearing glasses. A quick-release button also makes it easy to get on and off.

Oculus Rift v Project Morpheus: Display

Both the Rift and Project Morpheus feature 1920 x 1080 screens, split vertically to deliver a resolution of 960 x 1080 to each eye. The latest Rift delivers a 110-degree viewing angle over Morpheus' 100-degrees, which means it has a bigger field of vision and it also adds a second display to the mix.
The demo version of Project Morpheus has a small gap under the headset, so there's always a little bit of light bleed and you can see your feet if you look hard enough. This might be oddly reassuring if you're playing a game in which you have no feet.
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The Oculus Rift uses OLED technology (from Samsung's 5.5-inch Note 3 smartphone by all accounts) in its displays, which has noticeable benefits over the first-gen Morpheus' LCD. It's brighter, has more natural colours, better contrast ratios and purer blacks.
However, the second Sony prototype upped its display size from 5-inches to 5.7-inches, meaning a 100-degree field of vision and added RGB subpixels, which help smooth out the image. Crucially, it also made the jump from LCD to OLED.
In order to reduce eye strain both screens need to operate at high refresh rates: the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay model tops out at 90Hz, but it's now Project Morpheus that wins out in this battle, as the 2015 prototype runs at 120Hz - higher than both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Oculus Rift v Project Morpheus: Hardware

All these 3D shenanigans require a hell of a lot of processing. On top of delivering a separate but perfectly synced imaged to each eye, both the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus have to stereoscopically render objects, keep a track of both the user's head movements and the headset's position in physical space.
And as the screen is within inches of the user's eyes graphical quality is paramount: an errant artefact here or a drop in frame rates there could send gamers into that particular circle of hell which is only escapable with a megadose of Migraleve.
The PlayStation 4 is just about up to task for this. It's at the very beginning of its life cycle so it's malleable and easy to add extra bits and bobs to, and its AMD graphics processor has been built from the ground up to handle stereoscopic 3D processing.
Nevertheless, Sony has had to create a secondary box that connects to the PlayStation 4 via USB and HDMI, to handle the specifics of Project Morpheus' operation. A neat feature of the box is that it also includes HDMI-out, so you can connect a screen and see what the user's experiencing without any distortion.
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Thanks to the flexibility of the PC as a platform the Oculus Rift's system requirements are more relaxed, and as well as Windows it'll work with Mac and Linux-based computers.
The computer itself needs to be capable of “running current generation 3D games at 1080p resolution at 75fps or higher," according to the Oculus site, which is a fairly modest requirement given the power of most modern computers. In fact, we reckon you could build a Rift-capable PC for about the same price as a PlayStation 4.
The Development Kit 2 version of the Oculus Rift comes with a tiny webcam, which is used to track LEDs embedded in the headset and provide positional information. However, the LEDs are only positioned at the front of the headset, so it can only track your movements when you're facing towards the camera. Crescent Bay brings 360-degree head tracking and expanded positional tracking to the mix.
Sony has a distinct advantage here though; it uses the PlayStation Camera to provide equivalent tracking, but it's able to locate the back of the head as well as the front so users can look directly behind them. And no, you don't need to be possessed by Captain Howdy to take advantage of this: Sony's The Deep tech demo features fish swimming past the user, who can watch them disappear into the murky depths.
The GDC 2015 announced model also increased the number of head-tracking LEDs from six to nine.

Oculus Rift v Project Morpheus: Sound and controls

Sound is a subtle but important part of a virtual reality experience. Sony – which is renowned for its Hi-Fis and Minidisc players – has a decent grasp of this, and used a huge sound studio to create a new 3D positional audio engine specifically for Project Morpheus. Slap on some headphones and you'll experience footsteps climbing stairs below you, or a helicopter flying overhead, depending on the game.
The Oculus Rift, up until DK2 at least, left it up to the user to figure out their own set up. Crescent bay adds integrated audio to the setup, however; meaning headphones attached to the headset as opposed to requiring a separate peripheral.
Oculus gave the headset a boost at CES 2015 when it announced that an upcoming Oculus Audio SDK would allow the use of Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) tech, combined with the Rift's head tracking to create a sense of true 3D audio spatialisation, meaning Rift developers could immerse users "sonically in a virtual world, surrounded by realistic sounds in all directions." Nice.
As for controls, Sony's PlayStation controllers are already spatially aware, and The Castle demonstration uses them to hack apart a ragdoll knight with a pretend sword. The closest PC gamers have to this is Razer's Hydra system, which gives the player a nunchuck-like pair of controllers to interact with 3D space. Again, this is something third parties are likely to exploit when the Oculus Rift is released properly.

Oculus Rift v Project Morpheus: Games

There's plenty to get excited about when it comes to Project Morpheus games. Eve: Valkyrie, War Thunder, The Deep, Castle and Thief were demonstrated on the system back in 2014 and this year London Heist is getting rave reviews from early testers.
These are very early days, of course, so we can expect Sony to give a bunch of cash to developers to make their games Morpheus compatible – among them is The Assembly, a “mysterious VR adventure game" currently under development by nDreams in the UK. There's also recently been news that Q.U.B.E. ² is coming to the PlayStation 4 and will support Project Morpheus.See also: The best Oculus Rift hacks
The PC, on the other hand, is already brimming with Oculus Rift-ready titles, whether they're new games, ports or fan-created modifications. Valve – the company behind Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life – has been among the first to ensure its games are Rift ready, and the hugely popular social building game Minecraft has been ported to Oculus Rift despite creator Markus Persson's disapproval of Facebook's buyout of the company.
The PC also has a well-established indie movement which puts the PlayStation's to shame: essentially anyone can create a game and put it out there for the Rift, while there are still many hoops to jump through to get your game on PlayStation Network.

Oculus Rift v Project Morpheus: Verdict

There's no clear-cut winner in this fight yet, but the two companies are far from following the same path. Oculus is taking a function-over-form approach to its headset, concentrating on perfecting the hardware, although with Crescent Bay there have been some aesthetic improvements. Sony, on the other hand, clearly put design first and foremost to begin with, but has impressed with some neat tweaks for the latest model.
The fact that the Japanese company's VR headset has a dedicated sound system puts it above the Rift when it comes to audio (although Oculus is making great strides in this area), and its head tracking is perhaps a touch more comprehensive.
The screen is arguably the most important part of any virtual reality experience and Sony's recent OLED revamp addresses a lot of the issues of the first prototype.
Then there's the ecosystem attached to each unit. The PC is the go-to platform for indie games, and it sports a charmingly haphazard flexibility, which always has been and always will be unheard of on the consoles. The PlayStation 4, on the other hand, is more locked down, and this adds a trustworthy stability to its games. Overall we love the fact that the really bizarre, brain-breaking Rift experiments are going to be coming from the PC.
Of course, most consumers will have decided which virtual reality headset they'll support depending on the hardware they already own, but the next few months are going to see some big changes from both companies as they chase your precious coinage.
Watch this space to see how they shape up.