Oculus acquisition by Facebook was "validation for VR," says Yoshida

Sony Computer Entertainment's Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida has said Facebook paying $2 billion for Oculus Rift was validation for virtual reality peripherals.

Speaking with Engadget, Yoshida said due to the acquisition, consumers outside of the gaming sphere will become acquainted with the tech.

"We meant to validate Oculus by announcing Project Morpheus, and the Oculus guys knew what we were working on," said Yoshida. "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 said Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg's enthusiasm for the tech and believing VR will be the "next big platform after mobile," excites Sony.

Yoshida also wants to build a collaborative effort with VR tech makers, in order to "share knowledge" regarding latency and positional tracking issues which can cause users to get "headaches and becoming nauseated."

"Those early prototypes had larger latency and positional tracking and may not have worked as well. I feel really sorry for people developing VR stuff," he said. "They have to test it. With the [Project Morpheus] kit we have now, what we demonstrated at GDC, I think its the first time we can really provide developers with something and say, you can use ours, and you'll be alright.

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."

Project Morpheus was announced by Sony during GDC 2014 in March.