Back in March, Facebook stole the headline for a couple of days when they announced their surprising acquisition of Oculus VR, the company behind the virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift. However according to PlayStation marketing executive, Guy Longworth, it seems that prior to Mark Zuckerberg acquiring Oculus VR, he had requested for a tech demo of Sony’s own virtual reality headset, Project Morpheus.
It is unclear why Zuckerberg wanted to test out Project Morpheus, although Longworth jokes that he would have preferred if Zuckerberg had acquired their technology instead. That being said, we can only assume that Zuckerberg’s interest in Project Morpheus might be as simple as checking out the competition to see how far they have come, and to see what the Oculus Rift needs to be headed.
Many have criticized Facebook’s decision to acquire the company. After all Facebook doesn’t really have any experience in gaming, so where’s the relevance? However Oculus VR’s founder, Palmer Luckey, did state that the acquisition will make sense in a year and we certainly hope to see something by then. In fact Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR gives the company additional resources, resources which might be needed in order to compete with Sony.
In any case it definitely looks like the virtual reality competition is starting to heat up and with alternatives like True Player Gear expected to debut at E3 2014 which is taking place in the middle of the year, it looks like players could soon be spoilt for choice.
Filed in . Read more about Connected Object, Project Morpheus, Sony, Virtual Reality (VR) and Wearable Tech.