After an entire year worth of information being drip fed to media and fans, today it was various PlayStation social accounts all around the world, spearheaded by the PlayStation Australia page (of all of them), revealing that the hotly anticipated PS5 peripheral, PS VR 2 would be arriving worldwide in “Early 2023”. Our most recent information drop came in July with PlayStation revealing the platform’s UI and Broadcasting capacities, which was preceded by somewhat less official info dump, with someone getting their hands on the headset, and then posting photos of what it looked like in the wild, allowing us to extrapolate cord lengths and more.
Despite us being slowly being introduced to the hardware, we’ve learned little bits about the games being developed for PS VR2 as well. From PlayStation Studios’ own Horizon: Call Of The Mountain, a partnership between Guerilla Games, and one of the publisher’s newest studio acquisitions, Firesprite, to Capcom’s Resident Evil Village making the jump, and a host of other titles announced in June and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners: Chapter 2, No Man’s Sky, the initial support is strong. PlayStation have already confirmed that at launch, there will be more than 20 games available for the platform.
One of PlayStation’s biggest priorities with the continued development of PS VR2 is not just the immersion of the titles, but the comfort that players will experience, with Yujin Morisawa, Senior Art Director at Sony Interactive Entertainment saying, “When I started to work on the design for the PlayStation VR2 headset, one of the areas I wanted to focus on first was the idea of creating a vent in the headset to let air out, similar to the vents on the PS5 console that allows airflow. Our engineers came up with this idea as a good way to allow ventilation and avoid having the lens fog up while players are immersed in their VR games. I worked on many design concepts to achieve this, and in the final design, you can see there is a little space in between the top and front surface of the scope that contains the integrated ventilation. I am really proud of how this turned out and the positive feedback I have gotten so far. I hope our PlayStation fans will also agree, and I can’t wait for them to try it out.”
On a more technical front, PlayStation is trying to be quite ambitious, keeping the cord that tethers the headset to the console, to provide an experience that its peers will hopefully be unable to rival.
- Visual Fidelity: For a high-fidelity visual experience, PS VR2 offers 4K HDR, 110-degree field of view, and foveated rendering. With an OLED display, players can expect a display resolution of 2000×2040 per eye and smooth frame rates of 90/120Hz.
- Headset-based Controller Tracking: With inside-out tracking, PS VR2 tracks you and your controller through integrated cameras embedded in the VR headset. Your movements and the direction you look at are reflected in-game without the need for an external camera.
- New Sensory Features: PS VR2 Sense Technology combines eye tracking, headset feedback, 3D Audio, and the innovative PS VR2 Sense controller to create an incredibly deep feeling of immersion. Headset feedback is a new sensory feature that amplifies the sensations of in-game actions from the player. It’s created by a single built-in motor with vibrations that add an intelligent tactile element, bringing players closer to the gameplay experience. For example, gamers can feel a character’s elevated pulse during tense moments, the rush of objects passing close to the character’s head, or the thrust of a vehicle as the character speeds forward. Additionally, PS5’s Tempest 3D AudioTech makes sounds in the player’s surroundings come alive, adding to this new level of immersion.
- Eye Tracking: With eye tracking, PS VR2 detects the motion of your eyes, so a simple look in a specific direction can create an additional input for the game character. This allows players to interact more intuitively in new and lifelike ways, allowing for a heightened emotional response and enhanced expression that provide a new level of realism in gaming.
PS VR2 is scheduled to arrive in Early 2023.
