Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida is super excited about the Facebook buyout of Oculus.
When Facebook bought Oculus the other month, there were a lot of unhappy people, but Sony’s Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida was not one of them. “I woke up that morning and saw the announcement,” Shuhei Yoshida tells Engadget, “And I was like, yeah!” he continued, laughing and thrusting his arms in the air like an excited child.
And as for why the man was so happy that the direct competitor to Sony’s own Morpheus VR Headset had landed such a massive deal? “For me, it was a validation for VR,” he said, explaining that “We meant to validate Oculus by announcing Morpheus, and the Oculus guys knew what we were working on. I think they were waiting for us to make the announcement, so it would be Sony and Oculus together.”
“But now Oculus being acquired by Facebook is helping to validate our efforts. More people will know about VR”
Yoshida added that “Mark [Zuckerberg] said he believes VR can be the next platform after mobile. That’s big thinking, and kind of excites our thinking.”
The Sony exec went on to talk about project Morpheus, and how it was working hard to overcome one of VR’s greatest entry barriers: motion sickness. “VR of the past, including our own prototype, has been very difficult to use in terms of getting headaches and becoming nauseated,” he said, saying that the company has been working with medical professionals on the issue.
Lastly, Yoshida stressed the importance of collaboration in the emerging VR scene. “We need to share knowledge. We can’t just make the hardware; it’s the game applications that need to be designed well. We need time for developers to experiment and find the killer application and, at the same time, we need to learn how VR applications should be designed.”
Source: Engadget
