Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “PSVR 2 review: future of VR, tethered to the past”.
The past couple years have seen a lot of virtual reality: companies pivot to the metaverse, and today we aren’t going to talk about any of that later this month, Sony is releasing its PlayStation VR2 headset, a follow-up to the first psvr from 2016.. The psvr 2 is the first VR system we’ve reviewed for a while, that’s pitched as almost entirely a gaming device. If you want a plug and play headset that supports graphically intensive Virtual Worlds, with Cutting Edge features like eye tracking and something called face, Rumble there’s not really anything quite like it, but at launch we’re still waiting for Sony to take advantage of what it’s got. Sony’S original psvr was an odd gamble.
The gaming giant was going up against the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive a pair of expensive high-end VR headsets that often required buying a whole new pc. Its strategy was to go low where they went High. The psvr paired a just good enough headset, with a lot of Hardware Sony already made like the PlayStation camera and the move controllers it plugged into the PlayStation 4. A console lots of people already owned. Its promise was in its relative accessibility and ecosystem, backed by a major publisher and the fact that it was surprisingly comfortable. The psvr 2 is a very different device.
It’S a completely new package of Hardware built for the PlayStation 5. launching February 22nd. It includes custom designed motion controllers head mounted Inside Out tracking cameras and internal eye tracking cameras, a feature: that’s not yet standard on all VR headsets.
It has a vivid OLED screen with 110 degree Field View and 2000 by 2040 pixels per eye and a 90 or 120hz refresh rate and at 549 dollars, plus the cost of a PS5. It costs a lot more than the Standalone metaquest 2, its biggest competitor in the field of VR games. Here at The Verge we’ve had three people checking out the psvr too me senior editor Tom Warren and Senior editor Sean Hollister. Our experience so far is that the headset gets a lot of things right, but that we’re still figuring out how much Sony will give people to do with it.
Sony’S first headset required setting up a complicated cable box and an external tracking camera, as well as deciding whether you were going to buy its optional Move Motion controllers. There’S none of that with this headset when you unbox the psvr2 you’ll get a headset with four built-in front-facing tracking cameras and a single usb-c cable that you plug into the PS5. The setup process requires starting on a TV or Monitor and then switching over to the headset, but other than that. It’S nicely seamless at this point better than the experience on meta’s Quest.
Thanks to a feature that Maps your walls and automatically suggests a play Space. Instead of making you draw one out, Sony is Apparently one of the only headset makers in the world that thinks you might want to play a video game without everyone in a 10 foot radius hearing, you shoot zombies, so the headset comes with a set of Snap-on Earbuds, instead of the current Convention of little speakers near your ears, that can introduce problems if the buds don’t fit you, but there’s a standard 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. If you want to substitute your own headphones, the sense controllers use a layout roughly similar to meta’s touch controllers. Each chant gets two triggers Two Face buttons: an analog, stick a menu button and a PlayStation button.
It goes without saying that they’re vastly superior to the 13 year old PlayStation Move, but they also feel a little more solid than metas controllers. They charge over a USBC like the PlayStation 5 controller and we had five to six hours of play time between charges, not as long as controllers powered by double a batteries, but not bad for a VR Gaming session. Also like the psvr. Some games can still use a standard Gamepad. We found a few pain points in our time with the psvr too, the headset’s easy to put on just like its predecessor and it’s actually lighter than the original psvr at 560 grams compared to 600. But although it’s relatively comfortable, it’s not as dramatically uniquely good as the psvr seemed back in 2016., its tracking generally performed well and it’s way way better than the original psvr, but we occasionally size shoes like controllers drifting slightly.
The screen looks great when it’s perfectly in Focus, but we also had to keep adjusting our headsets to hit that sweet spot and most of all that wire, meta and HTC have sold me on wireless headsets. And although Sony’s made that cable as easy to use as possible, it still literally trips me up, but Sony has laid the foundations for a solid VR experience. It’S planning to launch around 30 psvr 2 games in February and March, and it says it’s got over 100 in development. One of its early flagships is Horizon call of the mountain, a spin-off of Gorilla Games, robot dinosaur, fighting simulator Horizon forbidden West, but the launch lineup features several re-releases of familiar VR titles like pistol, whip and Pavlov, VR or VR modes for non-vr games like Resident, Evil.
Village and we got access to a tiny fraction of that lineup, so we’re still waiting to see how its overall ecosystem pans out. How do the games we did check out feel I’ll? Let Tom take you through it. I spend most of my time in Horizon. Call of the mountain, it’s the psvr, 2’s Flagship title and while it starts off slow, like a kind of disney-like ride in a boat where you’re appreciating all the beautiful scenery around you, it soon moves into combat and climbing, and I think this is where it really Shows off the haptic system and just what this headset is capable of. There’S a high amount of detail in the plants and the trees that surround you in the early stages and everything looks really well lit. There’S even a bit at the beginning, where a tall neck steps over your boat and you’re just free to sit there and smash your hands in the water.
Just check out these ants chilling out on a rock next to exactly where I’m climbing this level of detail. I think really helps with the immersiveness in VR, but I didn’t always feel fully immersed when I was traversing rocks or going across wooden beams, and I think a lot of this was down to the psvr 2’s hand, tracking that didn’t always place my hands down correctly. I also noticed some occasional issues with tracking during the bow and arrow combat and even times when a warning would pop up about bright lights. Still, I think Horizon does a good job of showing why the psvr2 headset needs to be Tethered to the PS5, we’re still in the very early stages of this new VR headset. And I think we need to see a bunch more games to really understand exactly how the PS5 is pushing this hardware and to see some more Flagship.
Titles really take advantage of Sony’s powerful console to really make the psvr2 headset shine. I tried connecting the psvr to headset directly into a USBC port on an AMD graphics card. Now Windows picked it up as a second screen and limited the resolution to 1080p, but steamvr just kept asking me to plug in my VR headset as it couldn’t recognize the psvr too.
Now someone might just get this all working eventually, but there’s no official support from Sony just yet and no real sign that the company will support PCS in the future. I think that’s really disappointing, because at 549 this would be a really interesting alternative for PC Gamers. Looking at VR headsets Sony is trying some interesting extra features. I meant I may scramble a while back and it’s exactly what you might guess.
A vibration that shakes the face mask on your headset face Rumble is a theoretically cool idea, but it can be distracting when it’s harsh, although fortunately you can turn it off and when it’s gentler, I kind of tuned it out, which might mean it’s a really intuitive Seamless part of the VR experience – or it might just not do much for me yet what Sony has sold me on is eye tracking in games. It’S easy for eye tracking to feel either gimmicky or ignorable, but Horizon uses it in subtle, very natural feeling ways when you’re in a conversation with a character, for instance, you can look at a dialog option to select it instead of turning your controller’s analog. Stick eye tracking is also supposed to enable foviated rendering which lets games render at a higher resolution right where you’re looking.
But it’s harder to see the effects of that so far eye tracking isn’t the kind of thing you should buy a headset just to experience, but it opens up new options for developers and makes the psvr 2 feel just a little fancier. The headset isn’t just a VR Gaming device. Sony also has something called cinematic mode I’ll.
Let Shawn talk you through it if you’re looking at that 549 dollar price tag and thinking it’s not quite worth it, here’s one thing that might help cinematic mode. I am currently looking at a gigantic virtual flat screen television. I can use for anything else. I do on PS5, including PS5 Games, PS4 games, Blu-rays Netflix streaming, and I think it could actually be useful for somebody who doesn’t have room for a big TV in their house.
You can even kick back fly down point the virtual screen up at the ceiling and though you have to get fancy with pillows, because the PlayStation vr’s adjustment tile leaves quite a lump under your head, mind you, it’s not perfect. It’S only 1080p resolution in this mode and between that and the graininess of trying to look through VR lenses. I found that PS4 games, like the original Horizon zero Dawn, were a little bit too muddy for me to want to play, but PS5 games like Eternal work, pretty well and so do Blu-rays and streaming apps. I did run into one issue when I tried to play hdr on a 4K Blu-ray. It threw me some error messages. If you came here wondering, is the psvr 2 better than the psvr? Yes, it definitely is. If you’re wondering, should I buy a psvr too? That’S a little more complicated the psvr2 catalog overlaps with the quests and PC vrs, and it’s probably going to be smaller than either of those for a while, particularly because it’s not backwards compatible with original psvr games. You’Re in Sony’s lockdown console ecosystem. So you can’t check out new experimental projects like you can, with PC or Quest side. Loading and VR is still a new experimental, medium and okay.
I said we weren’t going to talk about them at a versa, but some people are using VR headsets for social spaces. Like vrchat and those can be slow to come to consoles like the PS5, if they show up at all, that might change if you can get the psvr2 to work with the PC later, but out of the box, the system, probably one of the flexibility, a lot Of other options do, but if you want easy access to great looking games, the psvr2 is in a uniquely good position to deliver it. The Quest 2 is an excellent mid-range gaming machine.
That’S fighting limited computing power. The quest pro has advanced features like Sky tracking, but it’s aimed at professionals valve set a solid bar for pcvr with the index, but that was almost four years ago and we still don’t know how some newer steamvr options like the big screen Beyond will perform. So if Sony brings a lot of PC VR games to the platform, its Position will get even stronger, mainly it’s code, for they need to bring Alex to it.
Uh Half-Life Alex is so good. Sony isn’t trying to reinvent the computer with the psvr too, but it’s made something that feels worthy of being called a Next Generation headset. If it can back it up with games to match what PS5 game do you want to see get a VR mode.
My final answer is the Dead Space remake. I’Ve played that thing like four times. I will play it again. .