Sony has officially uncovered the PlayStation VR 2 during its press conference at CES 2022.
The updated headset brags a raft of new features and hardware. 4K HDR in-HMD lenses, with foveated rendering and a 110-degree field-of-view, make this a much more clear, cleaner VR experience over the original.
Foveated rendering, for the unenlightened, is a sort of rendering used by VR headsets with eye-tracking. The headset tracks your eye movement, diminishing the rendering quality of everything in your peripheral vision. This, thus, extraordinarily diminishes strain on the hardware. It’s all exceptionally astute, and the client doesn’t will more often than not notice it’s occurring while at the same time wearing the headset.
Along these lines, better believe it, this to say the PlayStation VR 2 has eye-tracking and is now giving it something to do.
Among its other new sensory features, there’s additionally a small amount of headset feedback. The HMD contains force feedback that will give the user subtle, responsive vibrations working together with their activities in each game or experience.
This connects to the new PlayStation VR 2 Sense Controllers, which follow Oculus and attempt to provide more noteworthy interactivity with VR environments.
The new 4K HDR screens essentially redesign the HMD’s visual fidelity over the original, and Sony disclosed a trailer for a new VR experience to feature it. Horizon: Call of the Mountain is a new VR title from Horizon: Zero Dawn makers Guerilla Games and Japanese studio Firesprite. The short trailer shows an unbelievably lush visual stage, however it has all the earmarks of being on rails. The truth will surface eventually assuming it’s the VR killer application that Sony badly needs.
The original PlayStation VR was a bold move from Sony and set it apart from contender Xbox, which had no VR hardware of its own. The unit, nonetheless, was not the staggering achievement Sony may have expected. Its screens were foggy, as were numerous headsets at that point, and the FOV was very prohibitive. The library of games was likewise somewhat meager, and the decision to retrofit the older PlayStation Move controllers around the gadget implied it lost a great deal of in-game dexterity. The “killer app”, the Half-Life Alyx level must-play title the PSVR gravely expected to succeed never materialised, further harming the incentive to purchase.
With Facebook’s Oculus and Valve’s Index now its nearest rivals in the VR space, Sony has needed to move forward its game, and on paper at least, it hopes to have done precisely that. We will be exceptionally eager to get our hands on this HMD later on and put it through a lot of hardship.
PlayStation VR 2 doesn’t yet have a release date or pricing.