Next week sees Gamescom 2014 take place in Cologne, Germany from 13th – 17th August 2014. The event, which is one the most attended in the videogame industry, will play host to a range of news, announcements and updates from the entire industry, with hopefully a few virtual reality (VR) announcements also planned. It also means that the Gamescom awards 2014 are closing in, and the nominations for this year’s event have just been announced.

While there are 13 seperate categories for the even, which will take places on 15th August 2014, one will be of specific interest to VR enthusiasts. The Best Hardware category this year is set to pit the Oculus Rift VR head-mounted display’s (HMD) second development kit (DK2) for PC systems against the Project Morpheus VR HMD for the PlayStation 4. Both devices have been nominated in the category as the well Cyberith’s Virtualizer, an omni-directional treadmill for use with VR experiences.

The list is rounded off with Nintendo’s Amiibo system and the SHIELD Tablet and controller from NVIDIA. Overall that makes VR-dedicated technology take up three of the five spaces in the list this year. The Oculus Rift DK2 and Project Morpheus both offer positional tracking with 1080p displays, although the former uses an OLED panel that also allows for low latency head-tracking and low persistance. Will one of these two anticipated devices take home the prize?

VRFocus will be at Gamescom next week, bringing you all the latest updates from the VR industry. That includes a press breifing from Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) on 12th August 2014 and full coverage of the event that follows.