After lots of back and forth between Playstation 4 users and the developers behind Sony’s Playstation 4 hardware, we’ve finally learned the reason why Sony put that lightbar on the Dualshock 4.

In a talk with Techradar, Jed Ashforth, senior designer at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe revealed that the reason why the lightbar was installed and forcibly kept on was because it was designed to work with Project Morpheus, their virtual reality headset.

“The tracking light… it was our department that said we need that on,” said Ashforth. “It was for tracking for VR.”

He continued to elaborate over how frustrating it was when users kept complaining about it reflecting off their TVs, when they couldn’t talk about the device, as it was still under NDA:

“And when all these things were coming out six months ago and everyone was going ‘it’s reflecting in my TV,’ we were going ‘oh no’ because we couldn’t tell anyone what it was for.”

So there you have it folks – that bright LED lightbar on the Dualshocker 4 was specifically designed for the Project Morpheus headset. This is a bit surprising to me as it means Sony is taking their advancement towards the VR craze very seriously.