Category: PlayStation VR2

Posted on

Top 5 Best PSVR 2 Games To Play At Launch

PlayStation VR2 launches this week, but what are the best PSVR 2 games to play at launch? Here are our picks based on what we’ve tried already on PS5 or previously on another system.

If you’re picking up a PSVR 2 this week, we’ve put together this list of games to try at launch. The entries are based on experience while testing the headset for our PlayStation VR2 review and presented in no particular order.

Now before getting to the list, we should mention Resident Evil Village‘s VR mode in PSVR 2 will likely be one of the most harrowing and intense experiences you can have in a VR headset, with Capcom making a demo experience available for launch. We’ve started playing the game and while we’re having a great time, we’ll also note that it’s an intense experience – both in terms of content and VR comfort. Keep an eye out for our full review next week.

At the other end of the intensity spectrum, we should also call out standout introductory experiences Job Simulator and What The Bat? as both comfortable and playful introductions ideal for showing off your new VR headset to friends or family.

That in mind, here are our picks for the best PSVR 2 games to try at launch.

Best PSVR 2 Launch Games

Horizon Call of the Mountain

If you want a full breakdown of why this game is one to try, you can read our Horizon Call of the Mountain review. In summary, this is a must-have for anyone with a PSVR 2 headset – it features engaging gameplay and environmental details that feel comparable to Half-Life: Alyx. It’s definitely one to check out.

Demeo

This dungeon-diving turn-based game is both brutally challenging and an endlessly rewarding social experience with some of the most robust cross-platform multiplayer support available. You can play cooperatively with others across both traditional PC or PlayStation 5 platforms, as well as in VR from Quest 2 to SteamVR to PSVR 2. It was our game of the year in 2021 and, in 2022, we picked it as the best updated game of the year too as developer Resolution Games added significant new features to the title. Now you can even make a dungeon run with only two players as each player controls two of the in-game characters.

Pistol Whip

Pistol Whip is now easily a VR classic and also incredibly easy to pick up and learn as a new player, so it’s a great pick to try out on PSVR 2 at launch. We’ve given the PSVR 2 version a shot and had a fantastic time with it. So whether you’re a new player or a veteran, Pistol Whip is a fantastic option – plus, existing owners of the game for PSVR will receive the PSVR 2 upgrade for free.

Gran Turismo 7

This free update brings full VR support to the entire game, allowing you to get around the full Gran Turismo experience using PSVR 2. The only omission from the base PS5 game is splitscreen multiplayer support, for obvious reasons. If you already own it on PS5, you won’t have to pay a dime for the PSVR 2 upgrade – it’s entirely free. If you’re waiting for more details, stay tuned for our full GT7  PSVR 2 review coming soon.

Kayak VR

A fan favorite of PC VR users, this calming and stunning experience is coming to PSVR 2 at launch. It’s one of the most visually impressive titles we’ve played so far, making it a solid choice for launch. Plus, the PSVR 2 version includes a ‘Tour Mode’ where everything is taken care for you – don’t worry about paddles, just sit back and enjoy the view.

Posted on

State of Play Presentation Will Reveal Five New PSVR 2 Games This Week

Sony’s State of Play presentation returns this Thursday, promising reveals for five new PlayStation VR2 games.

With just one day left before PlayStation VR2 arrives, Sony announced a new online broadcast on February 23 at 1pm PT. This latest showcase promises “a first glimpse at five PlayStation VR2 games set to arrive later this year,” giving us our first major look at Sony’s upcoming line-up beyond the PSVR 2 launch games. New footage for the upcoming flatscreen game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, is also promised.

This isn’t the only PSVR 2 announcement that dropped today, either. Hours before this State of Play confirmation, Sony announced ten further games are joining the PSVR 2 launch window, including previously announced games like Runner. There’s also Gorn, which appeared in last week’s German PlayStation Blog, though this announcement doesn’t feature Solaris Offworld Combat 2, Wanderer Remastered or Project Wingman. You can find the full list and release dates below:

If you’re eager to jump into Sony’s new PS5 headset, you can check out our PSVR 2 review now, and we’re also bringing you a full PSVR 2 technical analysis soon. As for the games, you can check out our thoughts on Horizon Call of the Mountain, Kayak VR: Mirage, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge – Enhanced Edition and Cities: VR – Enhanced Edition right now, with more to come.

Posted on

PSVR 2 Specs & Technical Analysis: Displays, Lenses, Reprojection, And More

PlayStation VR2 ships today. Here’s our technical analysis of it as VR hardware.

PSVR 2 offers major upgrades over the original 2016 product. PSVR 1 required an array of cables connected to a breakout box and a PlayStation Camera, while PSVR 2 connects via a single USB-C cable and has onboard cameras for inside-out tracking. It also features significantly higher resolution HDR displays, wider field of view lenses, eye tracking, head vibration, and ergonomic controllers with thumbsticks & high-fidelity haptics.

PlayStation VR PlayStation VR2
Released October 2016 February 2023
Compatible Consoles PS4 / PS4 Pro / PS5* PS5
Connection HDMI + USB + AC Power USB-C
Lens Type Aspheric Fresnel
Field of View 100° 110°
Screen Type OLED HDR OLED
Pixels Per Eye 960×1080 2000×2040
Max Refresh Rate 120 Hz 120 Hz
Lens Separation Adjustment 𐄂 ✓
Positional Tracking Camera Bar Required Built-In Inside-Out
Passthrough 𐄂 Black & White
Eye Tracking 𐄂 ✓
Headset Rumble 𐄂 ✓
Controller Thumbsticks 𐄂 ✓
Controller Haptics Low Fidelity High Fidelity
Weight 600g 560g

You should read our full holistic review of PSVR 2 if you want help deciding whether you should actually buy the product. This article is specifically looking at the hardware and technology behind it, including comparisons to PC VR and standalone VR headsets, divorced from the pricing and value proposition.

HDR OLED Panels

PSVR 2 is the only released VR headset with OLED panels since the 2018 Samsung Odyssey+. While the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive (and even the original Quest) used OLED, LCD has almost entirely taken over the VR market since then.

Why did that happen? In some ways it’s a matter of cost. Those early modern VR headsets rode the wave of increasing OLED smartphone panel pixel densities, but phone resolution plateaued at around 1440p, as the incredibly minor advantage of 4K there didn’t justify the added power consumption. For VR resolution to improve headset makers had to acquire custom panels. Setting up a production line for LCD is much cheaper than for OLED, and thus LCD display makers could offer custom high pixel density panels for newer VR headsets, as seen when HP delivered the 2K per-eye Reverb in 2019. This is probably a major reason for PSVR 2’s surprising price.

OLED panels have a major advantage though. LCD pixels require backlighting, while OLED pixels are self-emissive. OLED pixels can completely turn off, whereas an LCD needs to keep the backlights to illuminate other pixels. That’s why OLED can display true black and deliver a near-infinite contrast ratio.

If you’ve only used LCD headsets, this will be immediately apparent when you first put on PSVR 2. Gone are the murky greys approximating black – virtual darkness actually now looks like darkness, and thus virtual nighttime actually looks like nighttime.

The colors are also more vibrant and intense, lacking the washed-out feeling of most LCD headsets. Combined with the high dynamic range (HDR) capability, the contrast and colors on PSVR 2 are nothing short of stunning.

There are some disadvantages of OLED that affect sharpness and clarity in VR though, one minor and the other major.

The minor issue is that OLED subpixels tend to be smaller, so there’s more space between them. This usually results in a more visible “screen door effect”, but that’s not the case here. Sony appears to be using some kind of diffusion filter to avoid that. The tradeoff of such a filter is that the image looks somewhat soft, not entirely crisp, so PSVR 2’s image appears slightly less sharp than even LCD headsets with lower resolution.

The major issue is that there is a non-uniform fixed pattern noise over the entire screen, called mura. It’s incredibly noticeable and distracting in loading and transition scenes, or when looking at a skybox or other low detail region. It’s not as noticeable in typical gameplay, but it’s still there, and it might leave some people missing LCD.

Overall, PSVR 2’s panels offer incredible colors and unbelievable contrast, but with a softness and noise on top. Resolution-wise, Sony’s marketing calls the headset “4K”, but it’s really dual 2K panels, providing 2K per eye.

Lenses & Field of View

PSVR 2 may be the last major headset to release with fresnel lenses, arriving at a time when all the other big players are moving to pancake. Pancake lenses have a shorter optical path and thus use smaller panels to enable slimmer and lighter headsets, while also offering improved clarity and a wider swee spot. However, they are significantly less optically efficient, requiring much brighter panels to achieve the same viewed brightness.

Sony’s fresnel lenses are a mixed bag. They have a remarkably small sweet spot, meaning you have to position your eyes almost perfectly in the center to get a clear image. Outside of this small area, you’ll see both blurring and color fringing (chromatic aberration). When you do manage to get your eyes into this sweet spot, the image is clear and focused to near the edges of the lens (though not all the way to it). Provided you’re in the sweet spot, it’s the best clarity I’ve seen from a fresnel lens – but still a noticeable step down from pancake lenses.

I suspect Sony stuck with fresnel because they wanted to keep using OLED at all costs. While there are plenty of LCDs suitable for pancake lenses, it may not have been possible to affordably mass-produce OLED panels with the required density to be small enough. Further, OLED panels are typically less bright than LCD, so getting a panel bright enough to overcome the low efficiency of pancake lenses may not have been possible either.

PSVR 2 has eye relief adjustment, meaning you can adjust how close the lenses actually are from your eyes. The closer you bring them the larger the field of view, but the harder the padding will be pushing into your face and nose. When you bring the lenses as close as possible the field of view is impressive, noticeably wider and taller than Quest 2, but that does come at the cost of comfort.

Separation adjustment is the another lens control, and wasn’t present on the original PSVR. This allows you to align the PSVR 2 lenses horizontally with your eyes, as everyone’s eyes are a slightly different distance apart. Given the sweet spot this was a crucial addition and should make PSVR 2 suitable for a wide range of people.

Reprojection Blur

PSVR 2 has three modes for developers to choose from: native 120Hz, native 90Hz, and a third that reprojects 60FPS rendering to 120Hz output.

The reprojection mode is the easiest to achieve, as it only requires 60 frames per second. It enables titles like Horizon Call Of The Mountain and Resident Evil 8 to offer modern AAA graphics. But it has a horrible, incredibly noticeable side effect. Some call it double imaging, while others call it ghosting.

When moving your head around, you’ll notice a motion blur along the edges of every object, and you’ll notice the same on your hands when moving them too. When I first tried PSVR 2 I thought this was a glitch with the game or the unit, so actually asked for it to be rebooted to see if it would be solved. I was shocked to discover it was normal.

Graphically simpler games use the native display modes, completely avoiding this issue. They play as smooth as butter and make you long to have the same feeling in the likes of Horizon.

It’s perhaps possible that Sony can improve its projection algorithm in a software update to improve this, as neither Valve’s Motion Smoothing nor Meta’s SpaceWarp are anywhere near as bad as PSVR2’s reprojection. If that’s not possible, I’d love to see developers of high fidelity titles offer a graphically inferior “performance mode”, as I’d choose it every time in a heartbeat.

Tracking & Passthrough

PSVR 2 ditches the clunky and limited camera bar tracking of its predecessor for onboard inside-out tracking via four cameras, Quest-style. You no longer have to worry about facing the TV or staying within a limited tracking volume, as you now have the freedom to move where you like.

The headset tracking doesn’t have any constant jitter, no matter the environment, but it frequently exhibits minor shifting into position when in anything but ideal conditions, as if to correct itself. This is particularly apparent near strong artificial or natural light sources, such as a window or PC monitor. This was something I noticed in my September hands-on too, so it’s worrying to see it hasn’t been improved on yet.

The controller tracking on the other hand is essentially flawless for me. Whether I was reaching behind my back, moving them rapidly, or even occluding one controller with the other, it just didn’t matter. I’m confident these controllers can handle any VR game Quest 2 can. The impressive performance is probably thanks to the sheer size of the controllers and thus their infrared LED rings. They’re bigger in real life than they appear in images.

The same onboard cameras are also used to show you the real world, for setup or when you just need to see your surroundings. It’s black and white like Quest 2, but significantly higher resolution, sharp enough to make out small details. However, it’s clearly not perspective-correct. There is distortion over the entire view, and walking around the room in it made me feel queasy. Sony isn’t pitching this as a mixed reality headset though, so that’s not a big deal.

Performance & Foveated Rendering

Performance in VR isn’t akin to regular gaming. Outside of VR, dipping below the target framerate is a minor annoyance, but in VR dropping even a few frames makes people feel physically sick and appears as if the entire virtual world around you is juddering.

On PC-based VR platforms, the wide range of different PC components and background services mean you can never be sure what kind of performance you’ll get. Ensuring a smooth experience requires a lot of manual tweaking of settings and resolution.

One of the best things about PlayStation VR is that performance is far more stable and consistent than on any other VR platform, with no tweaking or experimenting required. The console situation of developers targeting known hardware and tightly optimizing around it to maintain performance is ideal for VR. This is also theoretically the case for Quest and Pico, but in practice their mobile processors mean that sometimes dropping frames is simply unavoidable, no matter how hard the developer tries to avoid it.

The PlayStation 5, on the other hand, has sufficient horsepower that I saw almost no frame drops in any of the games I tried. This is probably helped by foveated rendering, but even when I disabled eye tracking it didn’t affect performance – though it did appear to lower the visible resolution.

Posted on

WATCH: First Gameplay From The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR On PSVR 2

A new gameplay walkthrough video posted to the PlayStation YouTube channel gives us our first proper look at The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR, an upcoming horror-themed rollercoaster shooter for PlayStation VR2.

The video reveals a bunch of new details, including a first look at some of the game’s key mechanics. As previously revealed, Switchback VR will use eye tracking to introduce an enemy that only moves when you blink, à la Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. However, Supermassive Games swap out angels for creepy mannequins in Switchback instead, which you can glimpse in the video above.

Game Director Alejandro Arque Gallardo also gave a bit more context on the narrative premise of Switchback VR. He revealed that the game starts on a New York-bound train at night that quickly descends into chaos – everything goes dark until you see a far-off light, like the light at the end of a tunnel.

It appears that you’ve been in a train accident, but Gallardo says that while you wait for help to arrive, you’ll endure nightmares featuring various horror scenarios set around a rollercoaster track. You’ll solve environmental puzzles and use weapons to fend off enemies as you trundle through a bunch of terrifying scenes, unsure of what’s real and what’s not. It sounds like an amazing concept for a horror game and the footage shown in the video looks fantastic as well.

Switchback VR is a spin-off of Supermassive’s The Dark Pictures Anthology series of flatscreen horror games, available on consoles and PC. Now one our most anticipated PSVR 2 games, this VR entry was originally set to release on PSVR 2 at launch but was recently delayed by three weeks until March 16.

Posted on

PSVR 2 Will Use Tobii Eye Tracking, Company Confirms

The upcoming PlayStation VR2 headset will use eye tracking from specialist group, Tobii.

Tobii itself confirmed the news in a press release today. This follows on from a February 2022 announcement that the company was “in negotiation” with Sony to be integrated into the new headset.

PSVR 2 — which doesn’t yet have a release date — is expected to use eye tracking for a variety of applications, including foveated rendering. This refers to a technique that tracks the user’s gaze and then fully renders only the exact center of where they’re looking. Areas in the peripheral vision aren’t fully rendered — a process that’s intended to be imperceptible to the user — reducing the overall demand on the system powering the VR experience.

In other words, this could help PS5 VR games run and look better, though we’re yet to see the feature in action.

For years now Tobii has developed eye tracking hardware that’s already been integrated into other VR headsets. In 2018, for example, the company worked with Qualcomm to develop a standalone VR reference design with eye-tracking. In 2019, Tobii technology was integrated into the HTC Vive Pro Eye. More recently it was integrated into the HP Reverb G2 Omnicept Edition and the Pico Neo 3 Pro Eye.

Tobii says it expects the deal to represent “more than 10%” of its revenue in 2022.

While we still don’t know exactly when PSVR 2 is launching, reports are pointing towards an early 2023 release for the device and today’s announcement does suggest that Sony might only just be assembling all the necessary components to mass produce the device. This would be in line with a report from prominent supply chain analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, who noted PSVR 2 would begin mass production in H2 2022, speculating this would mean a Q1 2023 launch. As of today it’s H2 2022.

You can keep up with everything we currently know about PSVR 2 right here.