PlayStation VR2 Trip Report (Patreon)

PlayStation VR2 slams its way onto shelves this week… or does it? It seems that Sony’s new virtual reality headset is still only available for purchase direct from the company’s online store. As of right now, the Monday before its Wednesday release, the unit is still in stock and ready for delivery at or very close to launch. When I think about how the PlayStation 5 itself is only really just now becoming an item you can acquire without having to jump through a bunch of stock-checking, scalper-laden hoops, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the PSVR2’s decidedly “available” status. Not long after I started checking in on that stock to see if or when it’d sell out, Sony sent a PlayStation VR2 headset over my way so I could try it for myself. As someone who hasn’t spent much time at all in VR over the last two years, it served as a powerful reminder of both the strengths and the inherent limitations of today’s virtual reality. The PlayStation VR2 is a fantastic headset with a great mix of comfort, convenience, and technology. But I think the reality of virtual reality remains largely unchanged, and the state of software development left me a little lukewarm on the whole thing.

At $550, you’d be right to expect the PlayStation VR2 to be a step beyond the other mainstream headsets out there. Good news: it is! It has a higher per-eye resolution than headsets like the Valve Index or the Meta Quest 2. Perhaps more importantly, these screens are HDR-friendly OLED screens. If you’ve ever put on a headset and noticed how it feels like you just live in a dingy, gray void every time a game tries to go dark or give you a loading screen or anything, the true blackness of a proper void now awaits you. That said, the screens still don’t look as crisp as, say, the monitor or phone that you’re probably reading this on. When you get those things up close to your eyeballs, you’ll probably still notice some softness in the image. I’m not exactly A/B testing the different headsets here, but the field of view feels about the same as the other recent headsets on the market, so it still feels like you’re viewing the world through a set of goggles.

One of the big points in favor of the original PlayStation VR was its comfort. VR headsets are kind of a hassle! It was nice to have the PSVR be lightweight, very adjustable, and very easy to get on and off. PSVR2 also focuses on this same stuff. It has an easily adjustable ring that fits around your dome, and once you’ve got that part in place you can easily move the headset itself up, down, in, and out to get everything aligned. It’s pretty lightweight and the cabling situation is much improved over its predecessor. Now the headset just requires a single USB-C cable, which plugs easily into the front of the PlayStation 5. Would a wireless option be better? I mean, the option would be great, sure. But given the light weight and overall comfort of the headset itself, I’m not sure that I’d want to weigh it down with battery packs or silly-ass belt packs. In my experience, the cable is barely there, and it’s also long enough to prevent you from ending up in a lot of tight cable situations.

On the new feature front, the PSVR2 offers inside-out tracking instead of PSVR1’s awful camera-based setup. That thing was a drag and had all sorts of specific lighting requirements that I never seemed to be able to meet. Outside of controlled demo environments, I don’t think I ever had a single trouble-free session with the original PSVR. It was always janky. Maybe my room was too bright… or, uh, dark? I don’t know. The inside-out tracking style is fairly standard these days and makes sense for a mainstream-focused device. While I think you could make a case for external lighthouses and other sensors for a dedicated, enthusiast environment, we’re well past the point of asking the average person to strap a bunch of shit to their walls. The headset also has a really great pass-through camera, which is great for showing you what the headset is seeing while also just, ya know, letting you figure out where you’re standing before you bump into anything.

The PSVR2 setup process is very slick, serving as both a calibration of the hardware’s fit and a quick taste of the various features. You’ll draw a playspace on your floor by looking around the room with the pass-through camera. It’ll fill in shapes and get a sense for the layout of your room, mapping around obstacles and figuring out where your floor is. Once that’s done, you can manually adjust it, which I had to do in order to get the unit to recognize some floor space that had some pesky, reflective glass on it. When mapping out this playspace, it’ll tell you what sort of experiences you’re set up to… experience. Anything less than a 6’7” square takes you out of contention for “room scale” experiences, meaning you can only play games that support standing or seated play. This means if you don’t have a properly large playspace mapped out, you can’t even launch a game like What The Bat, which only supports room scale setups.

The setup also spends some time staring at your eyeballs to calibrate eye-tracking. The first part is pretty basic, you look at a dot as it moves around on light and dark backgrounds, then test the calibration by looking at the outside edges of the screen. From there it moves on to letting you set the distance between your eyeballs.

Setting this Interpupillary distance, or IPD, is usually done by feel on the other headsets I’ve tried. You pretty much just have to turn a dial that moves the lenses closer or further apart until everything looks right. Some headsets don’t even offer a way to change this, which can be a hassle. PSVR2 uses a dial to move the lenses, but it also uses the eye-tracking cameras to help you get it all right. After all, it knows exactly where your eyes are, so it’s quite good at knowing if it can see the eyes properly or not. Once you’ve positioned some dots in the center of some circles, representing your eyes and the lenses, it auto-completes and works quite well. As this was my first experience with an eye-tracking headset, I was pretty impressed with it being used this way.

The headset fits well on your face and keeps things dark thanks to a folded, accordion-like rubber gasket that situates itself around your eyes. Also, the headset vibrates a bit. This seemed like a cool idea on paper, but in practice it felt a little weak in the games that used it and it doesn’t add much to the experience. The controllers, which are setup in what seems to be becoming a fairly standard layout for VR hands, also have vibration and use similar technology to the PS5’s default controller to add haptics and resistance on the analog trigger. I felt a bit of this in Horizon VR and found that the resistance felt a bit weaker than I expected, though I can’t really say if that’s a controller issue or if the games just aren’t going all the way on that stuff. Either way, the controllers are surprisingly lightweight and feel good in the hand.

Solid tracking is key for immersion and, to be honest, good tracking is also part of what keeps you from getting sick. I’ve had a mostly fine experience with this so far, though I kept finding that situations where I had to lift my hands over my head—like almost all the climbing in Horizon VR, for example, sometimes led to tracking mishaps. Most often this would be seen as stuttering or quick loss of motion inside the headset, though occasionally the unit would just drop out of the game completely and show the pass-through camera with an error message about losing tracking. Once everything settled down, it would regain tracking and go right back into the game. This happened often enough to be disappointing in both Townsmen VR and Horizon VR. Is it a factor of my room’s brightness or darkness? No idea. I’ll try a few different things and see if I can narrow it down.

Now that I’ve spent all this time talking about the hardware, allow me to summarize and tell you that the hardware is just fine. Same pros and cons as a lot of other headsets, though the comparisons only matter so much because we’re talking about a VR headset that only works on a PlayStation 5 and only works with VR games built for the PlayStation 5 and sold through the PlayStation 5 store. That’s fine, assuming that Sony continues to develop and release big games for the PSVR2 while also properly incentivizing third-party developers to do the same. Even still, a big part of the appeal of VR for me is just how Wild West it can really get. When a VR headset is hooked up to a PC, there’s a world of mods and experiments and utter garbage to get lost in. Want to see how Cyberpunk 2077 plays in VR? There’s a mod for that on PC, but it’s all but a guarantee that PSVR2 owners will never get to see any of that stuff. While some hold out hope that someone will eventually hack a PSVR2 to work on a PC—which would be pretty cool—people who have tried to do this with other headsets have sounded pessimistic that this will be possible with a PSVR2. I’d say the same thing about any other fully closed system when it comes to VR. The truly exciting stuff is too weird to be sold on a console’s storefront. I don’t think that’s a deal-breaker, it just means that the PSVR2 is best suited for a very particular type of person—a dedicated console player who has zero desire (or capability) to tinker.

As for the games, I’ll talk about what I’ve played so far on the podcast this week. I found the graphical fidelity of Horizon VR to be really impressive, at least in the opening. There’s a sense of scale that you just don’t get from the other Horizon games, and seeing all these monster machines walking or flying over your head is really cool. Once the game settles down and you start playing it, though… well, I don’t know that I need a new version of The Climb that also contains some clunky, bow-and-arrow-based combat. Gran Turismo 7’s VR patch isn’t available as I’m writing this, but this also seems like something of a no-brainer. They’ve lovingly rendered the insides of those cars and it’ll be nice to see them up close in VR.

Eye-tracking in games is a bit weird and most of the stuff I’ve played didn’t support it at all. Rez Infinite has a new aiming mode that works with your eyes, but I mostly found it to feel really awkward. Your eyes are darting around a lot in Rez to see where the next enemies are coming from, and having a reticle chase your gaze (while noticeably lagging behind it) felt off to me. I’m not sure if Horizon gets deeper into the eye-tracking stuff later on, but when you first enable it it’s used for selecting items on menus. Similarly, this struck me as a little forward, like it’s highlighting items that I haven’t even read yet. I don’t know! It’s a really neat idea but it hasn’t felt vital just yet. We’ll see where else it pops up.

OK, so where does that leave us? In a pretty good spot, overall. The headset itself is great. Fits well, very comfortable, looks great. It’s being driven by a PlayStation 5, which is more than capable of providing the resolution and frame rate needed to make VR excel. But I have a lot of trouble getting over the price point. A $550 add-on for a $500 console is the kind of sentence that breaks deals before they even get started. Straight-up, when I take the quality of the headset and look at the lineup of software and try to balance it all out, it’s incredibly hard to recommend this thing. Also, without making this a full-on treatise, making that number makes sense requires you to have faith in Sony’s ongoing ability to get games, both big and small, to ship with PSVR2 support. Taking the past history into account and looking at Sony’s relatively meager—in number, at least, if not necessarily in quality—first-party offering for launch, I’m having trouble thinking of this as the virtual reality headset to get.  I think if you’re going to invest in VR at this weirdly late-but-also-somehow-early phase, you’d be better off getting a headset that you can hook up to a PC, where the unbridled, full-on potential of VR is better realized.

Obviously that gets expensive if you don’t already have a capable PC. Like I said, there’s a very specific person out there, and for them, the PSVR2 is the perfect buy. For everyone else… well, I was about to say go buy a Quest 2, but given Facebook’s price raise and the way they unceremoniously cut-off the Quest 1 while running away screaming from the very idea of PC-based VR, I don’t know that there’s a clear answer to this question right now. Ya know, you might just want to wait and see what’s next. If these rumors of Valve producing a standalone headset end up being true, that may end up being a solid solution down the line. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you “don’t buy the things available now because instead you should wait for a device that hasn’t even been announced formally.” That’s crazy. But even if we limit this discussion to the PSVR2, I think a wait-and-see approach to how the next wave or two of software is received makes plenty of sense.