For years, the PlayStationVR unit was always a comfortable third behind the likes of the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift (now Meta Quest). Unlike the other two headsets, which cost an arm and a leg at the time to run a virtual reality experience (HTC was $799 starting, Oculus was $599 + a computer system with a capable GPU – you’re sitting around $2k-3k with either), all you needed for the PSVR was a PlayStation 4 ($299) and the headset itself ($299). And a camera ($59.99) and a pair of Move controllers ($59.99). Added all up, it was still cheaper than the PC-based VR units and you essentially got the same type of experience from it. Granted, there wasn’t a way to access a huge library that the likes of Steam had at the time, but it was still an inexpensive way to get your VR fix.
Now, as much as I love the PSVR, it has one huge issue. The number of wires that needed to be hooked up to a separate passthrough box to get the thing to work. The wires from the PSVR headset went into the passthrough box. The passthrough box had a micro-USB cable hooked to the PS4. The PS4’s HDMI had to pass through the box and the television’s HDMI had to be there to catch the output. There was also power and the available mini-USB plugs to power the Move controllers. To say that it was a burden to move around would be a tremendous understatement. When that thing was hooked up, it more than likely stay put. Let’s just say I never went on vacation with it.
BUT! The experience was good. It had some amazing games on it, including an Astro Bot game, Moss, and Beat Saber, so the cost of VR really did pay off in 2016 when this headset arrived. Not having to invest in a PC was a huge plus to getting the same VR experience they were providing at the time.
Fast-forward to this past February and Sony Interactive Entertainment decided that a sequel to the seven-year-old PSVR system was in order. While the cost for the PlayStationVR 2 might frighten some folks away (coming in at $549.99 MSRP), the technology packed into the system is above and beyond the first, and it has future-proofed itself for the next seven more years. Compared to its competition, the PSVR 2 actually delivers more options at a more economical and technological value.
Let’s discuss why you should consider this route.
Plug and PlayStationVR 2
It took me about 10 minutes to get the PSVR 2 out of the box and hooked up to my PlayStation 5. About five of those minutes were spent trying to peel the box tape off so that I could get to the headset. Every time I trim my fingernails, I need them that day for something. So, there it is. Once the box was open, it was quick.
What’s in the box???!
Once the box was open, I had semi-charged controllers that could be hooked up via USB-C for charging, one earbud wire that ran along the back of the headset and plugged into a mini input, and, and this is the very best part of the unboxing journey, a single USB-C wire that ran from the headset unit and hooked into the front of my PS5. There wasn’t any passthrough box, no multiple wires to fiddle with, and no power to hook up separately. Thanks to the magic of USB-C, which handles power and video delivery at lightning speeds, I was ready to roll in about five minutes. This was literally a plug-and-play experience, and it instantly made this headset portable. It was remarkably easy from box opening to system hook-up. I’m still all smiles when it comes to how quickly I could get it going.
Once hooked up, the unit works somewhat the same way as its predecessor. You have an adjustment button on the front of the headset for the viewfinder, a headband button on the back for pulling the band that wraps around your head so that you can get your noggin in smoothly, and then a circular tightening adjustment knob around that same button so that you can fully tighten the headset comfortably to your liking. Once you get the headset on, attach the earbud wire along the backside of the headset, and press the power button in the center under the viewfinder, then the software begins its calibration.
Calibration Station
Software calibration is an easy process. Much like the Meta Quest 2, the headset gives you outward-facing camera viewing when you’re calibrating the VR experience. This means you can see your surroundings through the headset and avoid bumping into furniture, walls, or cats. The software takes you through a few steps. The first is to create a small boundary calibration of your surroundings. It asks you to look around directly at the floor, walls, and ceiling so that it can measure the amount of space you have to work with for your VR experience. You get some 1980 TRON-like graphics going on when it creates the space during this process. It’s magical as it is fascinating.
Once that is done, you can edit the space if you wish, set a permanent space for your boundaries (which could be big or small), and then you’re asked if you want a sitting or standing position. Most games have a 6’x7’ standard, so space is sometimes at a premium if you don’t have a dedicated VR room. In the Esports studio at the University of Maryland, where I first tested the PSVR 2 out, the sky was the limit for space. This meant I could choose a standing position with spacious boundaries to work with. At home, it was a different story. My 1953 home was never built for VR, which meant sitting was the best option for play. Truth be told, I would prefer the latter because I have kids and they have no sense of VR boundary, so the less they hit and break, the better it is for them and the household. Also, I’m old, and I sometimes lose track of my own boundaries in VR. I don’t want to injure myself, and thankfully, I didn’t for this review. Anyway, having these calibration options and having the flexibility to adjust them made this a flexible experience. In comparison, the Meta Quest 2 does offer some more flexibility with space calibration, but the PSVR 2 seems to want to give you the best experience without compromising the game, and it felt a lot more flexible with its process.
Tracking those eyes
Once the room space calibration is done, the headset moves on to the most intriguing part of its tech – eye tracking. When I managed a UX lab back at the University of Kentucky, we bought eye tracking for our HTC Vive to do research. This research included website eye tracking, tracking virtual reality moments and seeing how people view VR, and other various eye tracking projects. The cost for this eye tracker, which was simply small cameras that sat around the lenses of the HTC Vive, was about $2,000. Knowing that this is now part of the PSVR 2 technology at a fraction of that cost has left me flabbergasted. I’m sure the tech has come down in price, but probably not by leaps and bounds.
Anyhoo, the calibration is typical of any eye-tracking calibrator. Dots appear on the screen in a certain pattern, and you simply look at them when instructed. The headset even goes so far as to show you the positioning of your eyes within the headset once the calibration is finished. You can adjust the lens positioning on the viewfinder (left side) if you need your eyes detected a bit straighter. For a lazy-eye fool like me, it didn’t give me any issues, and quickly calibrated my screwed-up eyes for eye tracking. The calibration process was easy, and interesting, and it was 1:1 with accuracy. Yes, you read that right, 1:1.
While there isn’t any external software for the PSVR 2 that does what the HTC eye tracker did for us in the UX lab, and Sony should strongly consider it for the research community, having eye-tracking capabilities could mean endless gaming possibilities. Eye tracking is still young, even though it has been in development for some time, and the industry is really trying to find a comfortable fit for it in the gaming space. I’m sure it will get there, but it’s going to take some artists to tap into the potential. Some have begun that tapping. The next PSVR 2 game review I’ve got coming up tomorrow (Sunday) is entirely driven by eye tracking. While it’s more like a visual novel, it’s still fascinating that you can point, blink, and progress a story through the PSVR 2’s eye-tracking capabilities. Again, endless possibilities if given the right scenario and game.
Controls that are comfortable
Let’s be honest here. Holding the Move controllers made us all feel just a bit ridiculous. Glow-y ball controllers that looked like radiated ice cream cones were a bit…odd. I remember waking up to the Tokyo Game Show presentation where those were announced and just stared fascinated by the design decisions. They were pretty, and glow-y, and you would never not be noticed in a room if you were using them. Now, bad-humor-attempt aside, credit Sony for bringing those beyond their original purpose. They were intended to be used to defuse the Wii’s remote controls that detected motion. The Nintendo Wii was a money-making machine, and it was driven by those motion controls. Everyone wanted in on that, as the Move controllers show (and the Kinect). The Move controllers did a great job of it deflecting attention away from the Wii but didn’t go too far beyond that purpose. Before you assume that tech was a waste, please note that Sony didn’t waste the technology and abandoned it with the PS3 once the Wii was tamed. They brought the controllers over to the PS4 and integrated them with the PSVR package, which found a good secondary purpose for them. Those Move controllers worked amazingly with the PSVR, and with the PlayStation Camera. They were not wasted at all.
With the PSVR 2, you don’t need the glow-y balls anymore. The PSVR 2 controllers are amazing. Taking a page from the Meta Quest controller design, the PSVR 2 controllers are comfortably styled to fit perfectly with each hand. There is a large white ring that you slip your hand into, which seems to detect your wrist movement, an improvement over the MQ controller. The controllers feature the old familiar PS buttons and thumbsticks that are perfectly placed with the trigger and index buttons. The controllers have a 1:1 movement with zero stutter to them. The fact that all the movement detection is self-contained with the controller itself, thanks in part to the rings and the way the headset/PS5 communicates with the controllers, makes this one of the more accurate and comfortable experiences I have had with a VR unit. It’s outstanding.
In addition to comfort and accuracy, the controllers have about a 7-9 hour battery cycle with moderate to heavy use. While I love VR, I use it in short stints outside of game reviewing because my face and eyes can only take so much (regardless of the headset unit, it has always been this way). It took me about 3-4 days before a controller fully died. That was through two reviews. You will get a lot of play out of the controllers before you need to charge them.
Sound
When I was reviewing this system, I used two audio solutions. The earbuds that came with the system were the first. They completely blocked out any and all sound to keep me in the VR experience. Basically, they worked as earbuds should work. And they were comfortable.
The second audio solution I used was the PlayStation 5 wireless headphones. This was a better solution for me and it caused less fatigue in my ears. Earbuds tend to wear your ears out over time, making them sore, but this wasn’t at all the case for my PS5 headphones. The headphones fit around the headset unit and comfortably over my ears. Either way you go won’t be wrong, but knowing you have options is a huge plus.
Getting into gaming
Once you get beyond the setup process, then you’re ready to play a game. At launch, I had plenty to choose from, but I had a few games in mind that I really wanted to put the PSVR 2 to the test with. The first game was from Vertigo Games called After the Fall. You can read the review here. Suffice to say this first-person shooter did a few unexpected actions with my PSVR 2. While the vibration in the controllers from reloading wasn’t a big deal, it was nice to know that was still a ‘thing’ with the controllers. Ever since the birth of vibrating controllers with the N64 Rumble Pack, having anything less than a controller reaction would be emotionally devastating. Yes, I’m a drama queen. So, the vibration in the controllers was there. It was nice. It was expected. It delivered. Yay.
Now, the vibration that went off in the headset itself was entirely unexpected. When a zombie jumped at me and swiped my head in VR, the actual headset unit vibrated on the side where the zombie hit. I did not know there was a vibration in the headset. It scared the shit out of me. It also made me giddy that this was an included development option. The possibilities are frightful for such a simple addition to the VR experience. It will certainly make headshots from FPS games more interesting. Hopefully, not painful.
Once I got beyond the fall of mankind, I shifted to the most obvious VR experience, which was Gran Turismo 7 (free upgrade). When I loaded up the game for the first time, it felt like I was driving. While I didn’t use the PSVR 2 controllers for this experience, I was more than happy to use the PS5 controller and enjoy the literal view around me. The game allows you to look around a full 360 degrees. That means you can turn around and see the cars in the back (don’t recommend that during racing) and tilt your head up during a nighttime Daytona 500 race to enjoy the fireworks. To make the experience even better, the headset is so sharp and uses the good graphical juice from the PS5 that you can see the odometers perfectly on the dashboard. It was crazy how good the game looked and reacted within the headset. One final note to mention, there was a top-down car race I was involved with in GT7 that had the sun beating down on my face. My brain actually started feeling the sun a bit and I started sweating. Maybe it was the headset on too tight or my heavy breathing, but regardless, it felt like a real car ride out in the sun. It was breathtaking. If you get a PSVR 2, this should be your first experience. Definitely sit down with this one.
How developers put together future VR experiences on this system will be fun to watch. The tech is there and it’s ready for some creativity. I think Sony’s decision to put eye tracking and vibration in the headset was a good move. Maybe it’s a forward-thinking decision that people don’t know they need yet. For now, I can see the possibilities unfolding in the game space for the PSVR 2. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
Now for a Bit of a Downer
Backward compatibility with PSVR games is a guessing game. Some games that you might have played on the PSVR may have an update to allow you to play them on the PSVR 2. Some games, like Beat Saber and Space Pirate Trainer, do not. The former is more disappointing than the latter, but nonetheless disappointing as a whole. In the age of backward compatibility, moving beyond the likes of PlayStation 3 games working on the PS4 and PS5 without streaming, not having guaranteed updates or the capability to play PSVR games on the PSVR 2 is odd. I’m sure there is different code to work through and different ways for the old games to work with the new system like any console has to go through when a new one is released, but it would have been nice to try old games on new tech right out of the gate.
Now, there are some developers that have updated their games to work on this system, such is the case with developer Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator. I’m sure as time passes, we will get updates for older PSVR titles to work on the PSVR 2. Right now, it’s just random finding the ones that do. The ones you do get are great (No Man’s Sky ftw), so don’t look down on this downer too much. I’m hopeful that it will improve over time.
Pricey but good
If you are fortunate enough to own a PS5, then you’re in a good spot for this VR system. The $549.99 price tag is more than reasonable considering the tech that you get with the PSVR 2. The eye tracking alone is worth the price of admission, but add in high-resolution capabilities, a library of great games, comfortable controls, and an easy-to-use setup process and you have a price that is actually right where it needs to be. While it certainly is about $150 more than the Meta Quest 2 ($399.99), the capabilities between the two systems couldn’t be further apart.
The PS5 is a massive piece of hardware and it runs the majority of the show when it comes to processing power and speed. The PSVR 2 holds its own and compliments that power. The Meta Quest 2 is finite in its power and will hit a wall eventually with what it can do. The MQ2 is also a pain in the ass when it comes to signing up and working with its store. You can’t stream it without having a Facebook Account. You shouldn’t be forced to have that, but I understand why Meta does it that way.
If you don’t have a PS5 already, then you might feel that cost a bit more. It’s still cheaper than going the HTC route, and more flexible with game choice when compared to the Meta Quest 2. It would mean spending around $1000 for the entire experience. That’s still not terrible. It’s not as cheap as the original system on the PlayStation 4, but it’s not horrible when compared to the PC side of the tracks. My knee-jerk reaction was thinking this was a high-priced item, but when compared to everything else on the market it’s actually still very reasonable. Even if you don’t own the PS5.
Anyway, it’s mainly up to what you’re expecting out of the system. For me, it’s a justifiable price tag.
On that note, I have typed your eyes off for nearly 3,000 words. Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
The PlayStationVR 2 is a technological marvel for VR experiences. Its eye tracking, comfortable controllers, vibration headset unit, comfortable design, and easy setup make it a product that only looks to push VR into a normal game space. While it does have to sort out its backward compatibility with older PSVR titles, it’s heading in the right direction and should be a real contender for years to come.
