PSVR 2 Hands-On: The Future of VR Gaming

what does the future of vr gaming look like well it's probably a lot like what i just saw at playstation headquarters here in california i've been playing playstation vr2 and let me tell you it's good [Music] playstation vr2 is coming in 2023 and playstation already had a vr headset that came out in 2016. this headset has been announced over time we got a lot of details about it and it works with the playstation 5 which is already really hard to buy but the headset takes advantage of the playstation 5 graphics and adds a whole new bunch of things to after four games playing it basically adds up to the headset that i would have loved back in 2016 with a few extra things now keep in mind playstation vr2 is not a standalone headset so anyone who's used the oculus quest metaquest where you're fully moving around with no tether this needs to be tethered with the usb-c cable back to the playstation 5. similar to pc gaming but there are some advantages here you may not be aware of number one the graphics are really good based on the handful of demos i've seen so far it looks extremely vivid the graphics have really nice lighting effects and it's much more equivalent to the sort of stuff you'd be playing on a gaming pc perhaps even better if some games learn to optimize some of this stuff the other thing is that the trade-off for being tethered is the headset's really light like i was shocked when i wore it it's probably the lightest vr headset that i've ever worn the headset feels smaller and it feels just very comfortable to wear even over my big glasses which is not a given and it has similar to the playstation vr these kind of like rubber things that drop down over your glasses keep you protected but you move the headset in and out to adjust so it's not like a pair of goggles that you're pushing right against your eyes playstation vr2 does not use a camera connected to your tv instead it's got built-in cameras for tracking and it also is able to show pass-through so that's something that's similar to what the quest does it can scan your environment including kind of meshing out obstacles and it draws a barrier around what your play space is which you can then alter with a tool to paint it again similar to what oculus quest and other vr headsets already do the other thing this does is has you know additional adjustments for your eyes to change eye distance it also has something that no other mainstream vr headset has had at this point eye tracking eye tracking is calibrated with this cool little tool that they showed where you you blink your eyes and they're able to look around and calibrate the eye thing and it works automatically but once the infrared eye tracking happens it's being used for something called foveated rendering and that's to only focus on the area around where your eyes are directly looking to maximize the graphics resolution this stuff happens invisibly so everything just looks really good and the area around it is slightly less super rich but you don't notice it and it really seemed to work very well a lot of games that i played were employing that but we're not using eye tracking for other interactional stuff there's all sorts of possibilities for the way you could focus on things to be able to lock onto them to have eye contact with people and and a lot of other interesting ideas that have been discussed before in the future of vr and ar it'll be interesting to see how this springs that type of development the other thing that the playstation vr2 has that's pretty new is its advanced haptics now if you've never thought about haptics and rumble you should because a lot of the vr headsets like the meta quest use basic kind of buzzy vibrations if you've played a playstation 5 and have played the dual sense controllers really advanced haptics that feel very subtle and have this wave wavy rumbly spectrum of feelings that's translated into these controllers and it's in the headset so i thought that was weird but when you think about it when i play these games what it feels like is you're getting these waves of feedback like in the real world that you can also feel subtly vibrating into your head it would be like if you felt a train go by and suddenly you could feel it in all different ways that rattle it adds kind of like a sonic realism and there are also adaptive triggers that have force feedback that's on the dual sense for the playstation 5. it's here and all the weapons that i was using in game demos means there's real feedback on the triggers it begins to bleed into the experience and just make these things feel more real that's the stuff that excited me the most and the graphics elements but let me tell you what i play [Music] i basically did four games and they're all ones that have been announced one of them is horizon called the mountain which is the unique horizon themed uh game that's set in the same world as the two games that are already on playstation it's a post-apocalyptic world full of these like dinosaur robots if you haven't seen it before and this is not meant to uh necessarily require to have played those games it's much more of an experiential exploratory thing if you play games like the climb in vr where you're climbing up cliff walls um or you play games using archery some of those mechanics were in there a lot of it was exploring i was going on this river ride and what was really cool are things like the scale seeing things over my head that were rumbling all around me and creating the super vivid look when i reached out my hand and touched a plant moving by the haptics it felt very gentle like i was actually like it was hitting a glove that i was holding versus like just a buzz and there were little things to explore like painting or you know drums it was it was a little world and um it was it was very beautifully done and was an extended demo and i don't know what comes next the other game that i played was star wars tales from the galaxy's edge is a game i played on quest 2 and is being updated and enhanced for the playstation vr2 this game it was interesting to compare how it felt versus playing on the quest 2. the difference here again was really the graphics realism which started to feel much more cinematic and you could see the textures and especially especially lighting felt a lot more convincing and the coolest thing were the as i picked up all the weapons and blasters i felt the kickback and the feedback as i was using them they really felt like different tools and i felt like i could even maybe recognize them without looking at them uh walking dead saints and sinners chapter two is again a game that's been on other platforms there's a chapter two so again uh it's a lot of swapping out of stuff all around your body which is a vr uh interface mechanic i didn't know where my flashlight was or my or my uh you know where the heck is my rifle but i'm used to playing that what was interesting here again was that i felt like i was getting a little more of a subtle feel for everything was how i was loading stuff when i click things on and off it's like when you get feedback from something on your phone and the vibration can be very subtle like a little tap that's what's going on here versus a hard buzz and the other game that i played was resident evil village which i was terrified to play because i hate vr horror games i did not play seven i'd never want to but i might play it now because resident evil village wasn't as bad as i thought what i took in having not played it before was that it was beautifully environmental when i walked through this going up to this castle that i was marveling at walking through the hallways again the lighting quality was extremely good looking at a window and seeing how the window cast in light walking up to a painting which looked eerily real when i was being surrounded and then suddenly the the famous lady was like licking my hand um licking the blood off my hand and the the look in her eyes was like haunting and i thought i was really there you know a terrifying gigantic uh fat man surrounded by meat you know what this has even playing the game i'm just naively going into this and being amazed at the scale of it but it felt like exploring sleep no more and other immersive theater things a lot more i felt like i wanted to go pick up and explore things sometimes when i played these games and this is very early on in in the playstation headquarters sometimes the tracking you know had to reorient which is something that happens on a lot of vr headsets sometimes the visual and haptic realism were so good that i was like even more thrown but i'm sure some of that as we get closer will be worked out i'm curious to see but the feeling of that that haptics and the graphics realism were good enough that i'm really curious to see what comes next a lot of these games were ports and will we see a new generation of games come out that really make the most of this unreal engine 5 is promised all sorts of visual realism that will be some sort of like blend with what with cinema and games start to intertwine with and i was talking with um ilmx lab about that and about how the future of making these games could start to get really really strange similarly talking with the team behind horizon call the mountain i'm really curious to see how that inspires where they think about making games next and use eye tracking to begin to find ways to interact with avatars and possibly to get heat maps so the game can clue you in on stuff that you're looking at without you realizing it triggering events more automatically and dynamically especially with the eye tracking being able to push the graphics even further with the foveated rendering it's it's great some other cool things i liked about the headset is that i wore the pulse over your spatial audio headphones but you can plug in any headphones including earbuds and there's a crazy little earbud holder that's built into the side of these things that's like genius and you just pop them in and pull them back out i'm curious to use that but i remember the previous playstation vr they kind of dangle and i feel like the whole package of this is a lot easier to plug in i didn't do the setup myself but the fact that it's one cable and lightweight could really change how easy this is to use i know with the original playstation vr i kind of began to abandon it because i had a lot of breakout box stuff it had that camera there were just a lot of things to set up this is really a one cable plug-in solution even though it does need to be tethered and the sense controllers let me just reiterate sony's never had its own dedicated controllers for vr you had to use those old playstation move controllers or use you know the the dual shock the fact that these controllers are finally finished in a way that feels really great is wonderful two particular things i like the weighting of them feels lighter because the way the ring is moved back on the hand i felt like my hands could kind of float if you ever use valve index controllers which have like a force feedback grip these don't have that but the grip and the secondary button which is clickable are kind of feel like one in the same so i felt like i was grabbing stuff with that with that instead of you know kind of a three-prong thing that i usually do on the oculus touch playstation vr2 we just don't know when it's coming out and we don't know how much it's going to cost we do know it's coming in 2023 which is not now this is 2022 but it's going to be something to look forward to that's definitely happening next year and at that point there are maybe other types of competition will there be a quest three at that point could there be other headsets that emerge what about apple's expected headset 2023 could be where a lot of stuff is happening in vr thank you for watching and if you have questions about the playstation vr2 are you interested do you play vr a lot put them in the comments below make sure to like and subscribe and thank you for watching

Channel: CNET

Views: 880,784

Keywords: CNET, Technology, Tech, Sony, Playstation, Playstation 5, VR, VR2, Playstation VR2, VR 2, Virtual Reality, Gaming, Games, Video Game, Horizon Call of the Mountain, Resident Evil Village, Star Wars, Tales of the Galaxy's Edge, The Walking Dead, Saints and Sinners, Hands On, First Look

Id: A874oOdhyDs

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2022