Sony today showcased work on its own 4K OLED microdisplay for possible use in a future VR headset.
The display, which was developed at Sony’s R&D Center and not under the PlayStation division called Sony Interactive Entertainment, was showcased in a video as part of ‘Sony Technology Day’. You can see the footage below.
Sony Reveals 4K OLED Microdisplay VR Prototype
In the clip, engineers Yasuka Ishihara and Kei Kimura present a VR headset prototype that features two 4K microdisplays and new low latency technology. The microdisplays achieve 4K resolution whilst being only a fraction of the size of most current VR displays. This would allow the size and weight of a headset itself to be significantly reduced.
This isn’t the first work we’ve seen with VR and microdisplays – Panasonic has repeatedly shown off its own compact VR goggles that use the technology, though there’s also no sign of a consumer release. Work on lower latency, meanwhile, apparently combines different data to deliver response times of under 0.01 seconds.
To be clear, this technology seems to be in the prototype stages of design and certainly won’t feature in the new PS5 VR headset expected to release in 2022.
There’s also a render of a slim VR headset to open up the footage but, again, we highly doubt this is the PSVR 2 design. You can follow everything we know about the upcoming headset right here.
That said we reported last year that the wider Sony Corp was hiring for work on new ‘next-generation VR headsets beyond the launch of PSVR 2. It’s quite possible that, given VR’s applications beyond game, Sony plans to release a non-PlayStation branded VR headset in the future. In fact, the video above talks a lot about remote collaboration and live events. But, given the nearing arrival of PSVR 2, we wouldn’t expect to see any such product for a long time yet.
We’ve just had another glimpse at the promising motion controllers for Sony’s upcoming PS5 VR headset, this time from a recently-spotted patent filing.
The filing, which was published last week, is for a light-emitting ‘Input Device’ that’s detected by a camera. Several drawings feature the new orb-like design for the unnamed controllers, which Sony shared official renders of right back at the beginning of the year.
Given we’ve seen these controllers before, there isn’t too much new to share here, save for some new angles of the device. The drawings also show exactly where the tracking lights are placed on the device, giving us some idea of how the headset will track the controllers with an onboard camera. We already knew that the headset would track the controllers, rather than an external camera as with the original PSVR, but these designs suggest the controllers will practically be covered in lights to ensure stable inside-out tracking.
We haven’t seen the headset itself yet, nor has it been officially named, but we’re all calling it PSVR 2 for now. You can keep up with everything else we know about the device right here.
As always, we have to note this is merely a patent filing and not official proof of a final product but, given that we’ve already seen the final renders, it’s quite likely what’s being displayed here matches up with the actual design. We’re expecting these controllers to feature capacitive sensors for some form of finger tracking and, of course, the inclusion of analog sticks will be a huge relief to anyone that’s used the PSVR Move controllers.
Earlier this year we also confirmed that PSVR 2 will offer 4K resolution with foveated rendering and onboard motors for some level of haptic feedback. Sony previously confirmed the device won’t be launching in 2021, but we’re hoping to see more of it in 2022 at the very least.
After a few delays, we finally have a release date for the time travelling VR adventure — Wanderer will be available January 27 2022 for PSVR and PC VR via Steam.
RELEASE DATE ANNOUNCEMENT
We’re super excited to announce you’ll be able to don your time traveling shoes come…
Despite not making a release date in 2021, the good news is that Wanderer is only just over 2 months off (yes, we are thatfar through 2021).
Developers Oddboy spoke about the delay on Twitter, stating that “the overall choice comes from us wanting to deliver a well-polished game that we are PROUD to share with you all. Pushing back to a solid date gives us the confidence to create that!”
To balance out the news of another delay, Oddboy also shared some short new gameplay videos with details on the game’s mechanics and lore.
Temporal transporter
Harnessing these black holes will need some managing.
Learn how to operate the mysterious time transporter – the more you progress and time jump, the closer you’ll come to understanding the transporter, and, more importantly, how to use it. pic.twitter.com/2MD72pr3aq
Time travel in Wanderer is linked to black holes, which you will harness using the temporal transporter (which can be seen in the video embedded above). Using the transporter will take you to loads of different locations, including multiple versions of the future, such as a futuristic version of Boston 2061.
You’ll be joined by a companion, Samuel the Watch, who is “useful in more ways than one “and can be upgraded using items found along the campaign.
Watch
Your trusted companion through the game is Samuel the watch.
As well as being an integral part of your journey Samuel is useful in more ways than one and you can upgrade your watch strap using items you find in your adventures. pic.twitter.com/K4qGQQ30n4
Back in April, a FAQ on the game’s Discord indicated that the campaign would be roughly 8 hours, with replayable chapter selection. In terms of platforms, PSVR2 is “on [their] radar” and the team is also “working on options” for Quest, but there’s been no solid news on a Quest port beyond that.
Are you looking forward to Wanderer? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
A recently-published patent filing from Sony Interactive Entertainment (the PlayStation division of the company) details eye-tracking technology that we could see in PSVR 2.
The document, which was filed in June of this year and published towards the end of September (as spotted on Reddit) details ‘Eye Tracking To Adjust Region-Of-Interest (ROI) For Compressing Images For Transmission’. That seems to be a long way of saying eye-tracking for foveated rendering, a term that is specifically mentioned in the document later on.
New PlayStation Patent Filing Shows Eye-Tracking
Foveated rendering is a means of using eye-tracking to detect where a user is directly looking on a display to fully render only the direct center of their vision. The peripheral area of the user’s sight isn’t fully rendered but, in theory, should be imperceptible to your gaze. This in turn drastically reduces the demands on the machine powering a given experience.
It’s long been thought that foveated rendering would be key to improving the fidelity of VR experiences. Earlier this year, we confirmed that Sony’s new PS5 VR headset (which hasn’t been officially named PSVR 2 yet) would feature this technology.
There are some interesting illustrations in the documents that give you an idea of how this might work. In the image below, for example, we can see a representation of a normal, fully-detailed game image on the left and then another on the right that shows a high degree of detail in the center of the car, with that detail decreasing the further away from the center you get. “By utilizing foveated tessellation of real-time graphics rendering, detail may be added and subtracted from a 3D mesh for regions of interest,” the document notes.
At the end of the day, though, this is just a patent filing and not necessarily indicative of Sony’s work with PSVR 2. But we are expecting to hear more about the new headset soon, with a release expected sometime in 2022. You can keep up with everything we know about PSVR 2 right here.
It looks like Sony has a new VR headset on the way but, no, it isn’t PSVR 2.
Xperia Blog caught what appears to be leaked images of a new headset from Sony’s mobile division, Xperia. Yes, that’s right, this is a phone-based VR headset in 2021. According to the rumor, this new device will connect with Sony’s own Xperia 1 II and Xperia 1 III flagship models.
Images of the device show a plastic shell with a space in the front visor for the phone’s camera. There also appears to be a lens adjustment dial on the bottom. There’s no word yet on exactly what type of content you could expect on the device aside from one promotional image (below) that mentions 8K 360 degree HDR content. We don’t if it would offer advanced features like six degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking, but that seems unlikely.
Phone-based VR headsets have mostly died out in the past year as the industry has shifted to fully standalone devices like the Oculus Quest. That said the Xperia 1 III is a powerhouse handset with a 4K HDR OLED display and 120Hz refresh rate, so it could offer a pretty striking visual experience.
Plus we’re also seeing some interesting new takes on the concept – the HTC Vive Flow connects to a user’s phone wirelessly as a means of control and media viewing, for example.
So, no, it’s not exactly the new Sony VR headset we’ve all been asking for. But more details on the previously-confirmed PS5 VR headset are expected in the new year. You can keep up with everything we know about that headset, which hasn’t officially been called PSVR 2, right here.
Hasbro announced a new Transformers VR game this week, coming to PSVR and SteamVR headsets this winter.
The game, titled Transformers Beyond Reality, was announced at Hasbro Pulse Con, a virtual event featuring new announcements from the toy company. During the day one stream, Hasbro announced the title and gave an exclusive first look with an announcement trailer, which you can view embedded below. If the timestamp doesn’t work, the trailer begins at roughly at the 1:42:20 mark.
Hasbro says the game is being developed by Metaphor Interactive and will release for PSVR and SteamVR later this year. The plot sounds shockingly familiar — you will join the Autobots in a fight against the Deceptions to save Earth and Cybertron. What else is new? Beyond that, there’s surprisingly little info, except for some sparse Twitter and Facebook accounts associated with the game, which describe it as a “thrilling arcade-style first-person shooter VR game”.
This isn’t the first piece of Transformers VR media announced recently, but it is the first one available for home release — Transformers: VR Invasion is a location-based VR experience that will be available in the US, UK and Australia. The last we heard about that experience was last December, with a release date still not finalized.
It’s PlayStation VR’s 5th birthday, so I’m going to do what we should all try to do on birthdays: say something really nice about it. Something that, as a life-long PlayStation user, I don’t say lightly.
PSVR was the best peripheral Sony’s gaming division has ever made. There, I said it.
Sony’s history with console peripherals and spin-offs has been, let’s face it, a little rocky. For every time PlayStation captured a certain market with a specific concept, there were two or three other attempts that didn’t quite take off. The PS2-era SingStar mics and Buzz controllers found a home in Europe, but the PS3’s Move controllers struggled to truly differentiate themselves in the face of the technically simplified — and much cheaper — Nintendo Wii.
This is true even of its side-projects like the PS Vita. That handheld was, for all intents and purposes, a little miracle of a device, but a lack of software support and the increasing shift towards mobile games really hurt its chances. The general trepidation around launching a VR headset on PS4 was certainly understandable, then.
Five years on, I’d argue PSVR was not only the rare PlayStation peripheral success story (or at least relative success story), but the best side-venture Sony has pursued in PlayStation’s 25+ year history.
That verdict was far from assured. PSVR faced an uphill battle as a $399 add-on for an already expensive console that also required a complicated sprawl of wires for an experience that — at the time — precious few people could attest to. Not to mention that the headset used the already-aged Move controllers and a tracking system that couldn’t keep up with you if turned your back away from a camera. Overall it seemed like a much bigger risk than motion controllers or karaoke microphones.
But PSVR, and VR in general, proved too interesting a prospect for many developers to ignore. The headset had a surprisingly strong launch lineup that let you become Batman, drive a tank, race cars and pilot a spaceship. None of this content resembled the top-end of PlayStation’s usual output, like the impeccably produced Uncharted series or the God of War reboot, but it was a diverse portfolio that really scratched at something not often seen in the gaming market, something genuinely new. Even if a lot of the content coming to PSVR was on the scrappy side, you had to respect the sheer amount of innovation in the scene.
And that’s true of the wider library five years on. There are perhaps only a handful of truly incredible, fully native PSVR games. Astro Bot’s breadth of charming ideas certainly comes to mind, as do the genuinely unique experiences offered in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and Superhot VR. But the platform is in no short supply of good, even great attempts to bring beloved genres, franchises and even entirely different gaming experiences to VR. Iron Man VR’s archnemesis might’ve been limited computing power, but it delivered on its core goal of thrilling superhero combat. Hitman 3 didn’t fully implement motion controls, but sneaking through corridors by physically leaning provided a fresh angle on Agent 47’s adventures. Even if this wasn’t the definitive way to play the game, it was a truly different experience that didn’t feel shoehorned in.
These were games that had developers tapping at the glass ceiling if never smashing right the way through it. But, given just how unwieldy VR development remains even five years on, that’s kind of enough.
But PSVR’s successes can’t be attributed to Sony on its own. Yes, the platform holder was no doubt instrumental to securing giant exclusives like Resident Evil 7 and, more recently, Hitman 3, but a lot of PSVR’s best games have come from developers’ desire to create something previously unseen. In Stockholm, former DICE and King developers gathered for a fresh start with studios like Fast Travel Games. In Seattle, people that once worked on Halo took a chance on Moss and in the process unearthed a unique layer of player/protagonist relationships we hadn’t really seen before.
Artists that hadn’t really made games before like Innerspace created A Fisherman’s Tale, which provided possibly the most mind-bending puzzle experience of the past few years. Even the sci-fi blockbuster action of the PlayStation-published Farpoint was born out of a former Sony developer’s experiments with a gun-shaped controller.
It’s that hunger to break the mold that really sustained PSVR during a time in which bigger publishers were hesitant to commit to the wider medium. And these titles have led the headset to a respectable milestone: 5 million units sold as of January 2020. Now, compared to the many millions of units the PS4 itself has shifted, that’s nothing. But stacked up against the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets it released alongside it’s thought to be the clear winner (the lifetime sales of those two devices was never fully revealed). It’s a modest landmark to say the least but it served as a rare beacon of encouragement until VR headsets could become cheaper, more accessible and ultimately much more viable products.
As the headset has aged, it’s faced tougher challenges. PC VR headsets got better and cheaper, with tracking systems that practically fossilized Sony’s solution, and the sublime simplicity of the Oculus Quest has made it increasingly tougher to stand its ground as we wait for PS5 VR. And yet, somehow, the platform has still had notable releases even in 2021 with Hitman 3, Song in the Smoke and Fracked.
But it is time, though, to look beyond. PSVR has had a great run, better than many had expected it to, in fact. I can’t wait to see Sony bring this level of commitment to a new device on a machine far more capable of delivering complex, visually-rich VR titles and (hopefully) with much better tracking. It’s the story I’m most looking forward to covering in 2022.
But PSVR made plenty of magic with the tools it was given. At a time when VR’s future was far from certain, it proved to be the little headset that could. And I’ll remember every moment of eye-opening immersion, every struggle to get a Move controller to properly calibrate, every terrible VR movie tie-in and every unbridled scream of jump scare terror with immense fondness.
Camouflaj, the developers behind 2020’s PSVR exclusive Iron Man VR, are hiring a number of positions for a new AAA title.
There’s nine positions total, available over on the careers section of Camouflaj’s site, all of which describe roles working on “a new AAA project.” Some open positions include concept artists, gameplay engineers, animation leader and more. The listings don’t specify whether the AAA title is a VR title or just a traditional flatscreen game. However, many of the listings indicate that “experience with VR” or “experience working in the VR space” would be a bonus (albeit not a requirement).
Camouflaj’s focus has been on VR titles for a number of years now. Republique was their last non-VR title, released as an episodic stealth game for mobile devices and then ported and launched on GearVR, PC VR and PSVR. The team was also behind the PSVR-exclusive Iron Man VR — a game made in partnership and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
“Ultimately it’s up to how the game performs, it’s up to our partners over at PlayStation and Marvel,” he said. “But as developers we absolutely loved working on Marvel’s Iron Man VR and we would obviously be super interested to continue working on it.”
Gran Turismo 7 developer Polyphony Digital is tight-lipped about potential PS5 VR and PSVR support… for now.
In an interview with Eurogamer, series creator Kazunori Yamauchi was asked about PSVR support for the upcoming racing sim. He simply replied: “So regarding PSVR, we’re not at a state where we cannot talk about it yet.”
Well, that’s not a no at least.
Will Gran Turismo 7 Support PSVR 2?
The question of Gran Turismo 7 and PSVR support is an interesting one. PS4 exclusive Gran Turismo Sport did feature support for Sony’s first VR headset but only in very limited time trial and one-on-one AI race modes. We thought the support itself was fantastic, but the lack of options — likely due to the extra processing demands VR puts on the console — really hurt its longevity.
In fact, in 2019 Yamauchi himself said that one of the biggest improvements he expected to see in the next generation of consoles was with VR support. “The first thing that’s going to be affected by more power is VR,” he said. “I don’t think that there’s anything else that requires that much processing power. I really like VR; I’m one to believe in the possibilities of it, and it’s very suited for a driving game.”
Those comments, combined with Yamauchi’s answer above, give us hope that Gran Turismo 7 could end up supporting the upcoming PS5 VR headset. The device isn’t launching this year, though we are expecting it to arrive sometime in 2022. You can read up on everything we know so far right here.
GT7 itself launches on March 4 on PS5 and PS4, and it will be interesting to see if the latter version has any support to speak of this time around.
A new update adds support for PS4 Pro on the PSVR exclusive title Arashi: Castles of Sin, developed by Endeavor One.
We first learned about the PS4 Pro patch just over a week ago, with little detail on what PS4 Pro-specific improvements we might see or when the update might arrive. According to Endeavor One on Twitter, the update is available now and we know a bit more about what changes to expect.
On patch 1.3, PS4 Pro players should see improved resolution, improved anti-aliasing support, increased LOD distance, increased shadow distance, anisotropic filtering on and improved stability. That’s all that was listed in this reply tweet, so for anything more specific you might be best off just giving the new update a go yourself and seeing how noticeable the changes are.
These changes should also apply to players using PSVR on PS5 via backwards compatibility, as the PS5 should run PS4 games with their PS4 Pro settings profile. Endeavor previously hinted that PS5-specific updates were a possibility, but there’s no update on that front yet — it’s seemingly just the PS4 Pro changes for now.
Arashi: Castles of Sin launched early last month and in our review, we found that it was a solid title with great open-ended design. However, we were also let down in a few areas that we felt held the game back just slightly. Here’s an except:
It’s a rare VR game that gives you genuine choice in deciding how to get from A to B and, when it works, captures the slick elitism of becoming a ninja. But it’s let down by clumsier elements, like bugs, bad enemy AI and underwhelming sword combat. Even these dark forces combined aren’t enough to derail the fun sneaking at the core of the experience, but there’s plenty of room for Arashi to improve with a potential sequel.
RELEASE DATE ANNOUNCEMENT 
JANUARY 27th 2022 
Thread below 
(@wanderervr) 
