Sony: VR devs are not trying to change the world overnight

VR creators don’t expect to change the world overnight, says the head of Sony’s London studio.

David Ranyard, who is currently building games for PlayStation’s Morpheus headset, likens the VR shift to when silent movies were replaced by ‘talkies’ – which took several years to take place.

VR is such a step-change in terms of immersion,” he told MCV. The two things that people say the most when playing [the firm’s VR demo] London Heist is: ‘Oh my God, that’s awesome,’ and ‘I’m a VR convert’.

This is not another 3D gaming. Fundamentally you are taking people to another place, and that is something huge. If we look at the first three to five years, there are various things that could go this way or that. But I like to look at the past to work out the future. If you look at cinema when it went from silent movies to talkies, it was a similar transformative change in the medium and it took ten years for the theatres in America to change over. There were quite a lot of films that were dual-authored for silent and speech.

That took a while to bed in because there were naysayers, there were establishment and business deals and things like that, but fundamentally it went in one direction. That’s my view with VR – it will go in one direction. The rate of that – the bumps on the way – you can’t predict.”