Eye of the Temple is one of the rare VR games that focuses on not just on pure room-scale movement, but dynamic room-scale movement. The result is a uniquely immersive experience that required some clever design behind the scenes to make it all work. This guest article by developer Rune Skovbo Johansen explains the approach.
Rune Skovbo Johansen is a Danish independent game developer based in Turku, Finland. His work spans games and other interactive experiences, focused on tech, wonder, and exploration. After positive reception of the 2016 VR game jam game Chrysalis Pyramid, he started working on a more ambitious spiritual successor, Eye of the Temple, and at the end of 2020 he quit his day job to pursue indie game development full-time.
In Eye of the Temple, you move through a vast environment, not by teleportation or artificial locomotion, but by using your own feet. It makes unique use of room-scale VR to deliver an experience of navigating an expansive space.
In Eye of the Temple you move around large environments using your own feet
But how does it work behind the scenes? To mark the upcoming release of Eye of the Temple on Quest 2, I wanted to take the time to explain these aspects of the game’s design that I’ve never fully gone into detail with before. In this article we’ll go over a variety of the tricks the game uses to make it all work. Let’s start with the basics of keeping the player in the play area
Keeping the Player in the Play Area
Say you need to go from one tall pillar in the game to another via a moving platform. You step forward onto the platform, the platform moves, and then you step forward onto the next pillar. But now you’re outside your physical play area.
Moving platforms are positioned in a way to keep players inside the play area
If we instead position the moving platform to the side, it goes like this: You sidestep onto the platform, it moves, and you sidestep onto the next pillar. Since you took a step right, and then left, you’re back where you started in the center of the play area. So the game’s tricks are all about how the platforms are positioned relative to each other.
Now, to get a better sense for it, let’s look at some mixed reality footage (courtesy of Naysy) where a grid representing the play area is overlaid on top.
Mixed reality footage with a grid overlaid on top which represents the play area
Keeping an Overview in the Level Design
Now that we’ve seen how the trick works, let’s take a look at how I keep track of it all when doing the level design for the game. First things first – I made this pattern, which represents the player’s entire play area – or the part of it the game takes advantage of anyway:
A pattern representing the physical play area
As you can see, there’s a thick white border along the edge, and a thick circle in the center.
Every platform in the game has a designated spot in the play area and a pattern overlay that shows what that spot is. For platforms that are a single tile large, it’s generally one of nine positions. The overlay makes it easy to see if a given platform is positioned in the center of the play area, or at an edge or corner.
The play area pattern overlaid on each platform and its end positions make it easy to see if they are lined up correctly in the level design
Additional overlays show a ghostly version of the pattern at both the start and end positions of a moving platform. This is the real trick of keeping track of how the platforms connect together, because these ghostly overlays at the end positions make it trivial to see if the platforms are lined up correctly in the level design when they touch each other. If the adjacent ghostly patterns are continuous like puzzle pieces that fit together, then the platforms work correctly together.
It still took a lot of ingenuity to work out how to position all the platforms so they both fit correctly together and also take the player where they need to go in the virtual world, but now you know how I kept the complexity of it manageable.
Getting the Player’s Cooperation
The whole premise of getting around the world via these moving platforms is based on an understanding that the player should step from one platform to another when they’re lined up, and not at other times. The most basic way the game establishes this is by just telling it outright to the player in safety instructions displayed prior to starting the game.
One of the safety instructions shown before the game begins
This instructions is shown for two reasons:
One is safety. You should avoid jumping over gaps, otherwise you would risk jumping right out of your play area and into a wall, for example.
The other is that the game’s system of traversal only works correctly when stepping from one platform to another when they line up. This is not as critical – I’ll get back to later what happens if stepping onto a platform that’s misaligned – but it still provides the best play experience.
Apart from the explicit instructions, the game also employs more subtle tricks to help ensure the player only steps over when blocks are correctly aligned. Consider the following example of a larger 2 x 2 tile static platform the player can step onto. A moving platform arrives from the side in a way that would allow the player to step off well before the platform has stopped moving, but that would break the game’s traversal logic.
In this room, ‘foot fences’ are used to discourage the player from stepping from one platform to another when they are not correctly aligned
To avoid this, “foot fences” were placed to discourage the player from stepping over onto the static platform (or away from it) at incorrect positions. The fences are purely visual and don’t technically prevent anything. The player can still step over them if they try, or right through them for that matter. However, psychologically it feels like less effort to not step over or through a fence and instead step onto the static platform where there’s a gap in the fence. In this way, a purely non-technical solution is used as part of the game’s arsenal of tricks.
If the avalanche of recent reports can indicate anything at all, it seems Apple is entering the VR/AR headset market fairly soon, bringing along with it the most inflated expectations the industry has ever seen. It’s probably going to be expensive, but whether it flops or becomes a big hit, the mere existence of Apple in the space is set to change a lot about how things are done.
The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. That award goes to an obscure PDA device called the IBM Simon, released in limited numbers in 1994. The Apple Watch wasn’t the first smartwatch either. That was debatably the Seiko Raputer, which was released in 1998 in Japan. Its monochrome LCD wasn’t capable of touch, instead offering up a tiny eight-direction joystick and six function buttons to browse files, play games, and set calendar appointments. Similarly, iPad wasn’t the first tablet. Mac wasn’t the first home computer. iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player. But all of these products have become nothing short of iconic. There’s very little benefit to being first, at least as far as Apple is concerned.
And while it seems the company’s first mixed reality headset could finally debut at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, like all of its other products, it won’t be the first MR headset. Just the same, like everything else the fruit company makes, it’s going to be the one everyone is talking about—for better or worse.
In case you haven’t noticed, Apple is a big deal. It has an ecosystem of products which connect to each other, design-forward hardware that has helped it maintain brand name cache, and a philosophy that puts user-friendliness at the core of its software experience. Oh, and it’s the most valuable company in the world.
And while the irrational exuberance for successive device generations has mostly petered out since its heydays in the early 2000s, reducing its famed long-line launch extravaganzas to more chill online pre-order releases, becoming an Apple apostate is still unthinkable to many. Once you’re in, you’re in. You buy the phone, the laptop, the headphones, and now, maybe you’ll get the newfangled headset too. Maybe. Let’s put aside the rumors for now. Forget about the spec breakdowns, hardware design leaks, software capabilities, etc. There are plenty of them out there, and you can read about those here. The only thing we know for sure is Apple is… well… Apple. Here’s what you, and probably everyone else is expecting.
Apple’s BKC Store in Mumbai, India | Image courtesy Apple
For Better: What Should Happen
Unless the company is making a drastic departure here, its first mixed reality headset should be built with this same level of user friendliness as all of its other devices, which means it should connect to the Apple ecosystem easily, and have a simple and intuitive UI. Log in with Apple ID. No muss, no fuss (whatever ‘muss’ is). Privacy should be a giant focus for the headset from the outset, since it will almost certainly pack eye-tracking in addition to a host of cameras to get a glimpse of the inside of your immediate surroundings, messiness and all. Apple has its fair share of data collection scandals, yet it seems to inspire enough confidence for privacy to be a big historical selling point for all of its devices.
If you want to avoid drawing the ire of tech reviewers everywhere though, wearing it should be fairly simple and very comfortable, and the experiences within should be of high enough value to overcome that inherent friction of charging it, putting it on, setting up a tracking volume, and wearing it for extended periods of time—everything we expect from any mixed reality headset at this point. It should fit most people, and offer up a clear picture to people with heads and eyes of all shapes and sizes.
Meta Quest Pro | Image courtesy Meta
An obvious analogue here is Meta Quest Pro, which is relatively low friction, but things like a halo strap that forces too much weight on your brow, or a passthrough that’s just a little too grainy, or a display that doesn’t have a high enough pixel per degree (ppd) for staring at text—all of these things make it less appealing to users in the day-to-day, introducing what you might call accumulative friction. You use it a bunch at first until you figure out all of the niggles, at which point you may revert to traditional computing standards like using a laptop or smartphone. The thing isn’t really the all-purpose device you hoped it would be, and the company thinks twice about when to send the better, more improved version down the pipeline.
One would hope that Apple’s headset, on the other hand, should have a mature design language and have obviously useful features from day one. While there’s bound to be some stutters, like with the first Apple Watch, which was critiqued for its slow software, short battery life, and lack of customization, it should all be there, and not require a ton of feature updates to enhance after the big launch day.
It should sell well out of the gate—at least by the standards of the existing XR industry—even if everything isn’t perfect. And it should be so cool that it’s copied. Like a lot. And it should drag top-level studios into the XR scene to start making innovative and useful apps that aren’t just straight ports of ARkit or ARcore apps made for mobile, but things people need and want to use in-headset. A big win from Apple should not only spur its new mixed reality product category, but kick off a buzz among developers, which would include those who currently work in the XR industry and Apple’s existing cohort of dedicated iOS developers.
But more than merely being the latest shiny new headset within the existing XR industry, Apple’s entrance into the field has a real chance of radically expanding the industry itself, by showing that the world’s most iconic tech company now thinks the medium is worth pursuing. That’s the way it happened when Apple jumped into MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, wireless earbuds, and more.
As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. The inverse is also true though….
For Worse: What Could Happen
Apple’s headset is reportedly (okay, maybe just one rumor) priced somewhere near $3,000, so it probably won’t be the sort of accessory that initially attracts people to the ecosystem; that would be the job of a peripheral like Apple Watch. It will likely rely on the pool of built-in Apple users. Despite the price, the first iteration very likely won’t offer the sort of power you’d expect from a workhorse like Apple MacBook Pro either.
At the outset, any sustained draw from prosumers will invariably hinge on how well it can manage general computing tasks, like you might have with an iPad or MacBook, and everything else current mixed reality headset should do too, namely VR and AR stuff. That includes a large swath of things like fitness apps, both AR and VR games and experiences, productivity apps, standard work apps, everything. Basically, it has to be the Quest Pro that Meta wanted to release but didn’t.
AR turn-by-turn directions on an iPhone | Image courtesy Apple
And if not, it leaves Apple in a pretty precarious situation. If their headset can’t find a proper foothold within its ecosystem and attract enough users, it could lead to low adoption rates and a lack of interest in the technology as a whole. Mixed reality is largely seen as valuable steppingstone to what many consider the true moneymaker: all-day AR glasses. And despite some very glassses-shaped AR headsets out there, we’re still not there yet. Even if Apple is willing to take a hit with a bulky device in service of pushing use cases for its AR glasses yet to come, the short term may not look very bright.
And perhaps most importantly for the industry as a whole are the (metaphorical) optics.
After all, if the iconic Apple can’t manage to make MR something that everybody wants, the rest of the world watching from the sidelines may think the concept just can’t be conquered. In turn, it may mean capital investment in the space will dry up until ‘real’ AR headsets are a thing—the all-day glasses that will let you play Pokémon Go in the park, do turn-by-turn directions, and remind you the name of that person you met last week. The steppingstone of mixed reality may get waterlogged. Those are a lot of ifs, coulds, shoulds, and won’ts though. The only thing truly certain is we’re in for a very interesting few months, which you can of course follow at Road to VR.
Apple’s entrance into XR has the potential to expand the industry by demonstrating its viability, just as Apple has done with previous technologies. It stands a good chance at carving out a sizeable claim in the space, but it’s a gamble that could equally backfire if both sales and public perception aren’t on their side.
Is Apple’s XR headset going to be the “one more thing?” we’ve all been waiting for at WWDC this year? Will it live up to the Apple name, or be an expensive dev kit? Let us know in the comments below!
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of April 2023.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
It’s exceedingly rare to see a VR software startup transition to making hardware, let alone decent hardware. But that’s exactly what Bigscreen—creators of the long-running social VR theater app of the same name—has done with its upcoming Beyond headset.
Bigscreen has clearly targeted PC VR enthusiasts who are willing to pay for the best hardware they can get their hands on. And with major players like Meta and HTC focusing heavily on standalone headsets, Bigscreen Beyond could prove to be the best option they’ll find any time soon.
Photo by Road to VR
The company has set out to make a headset that’s not just better than what’s out there, but one that’s much smaller too. And while it remains to be seen if the headset will hit all the right notes, my initial hands-on shows plainly the company knows what it’s doing when it comes to building a VR headset.
IPD (fixed, customized per customer) eye-relief (fixed, customized per facepad)
IPD Adjustment Range
58–72mm (fixed, single IPD value per device)
Connectors
DisplayPort 1.4, USB 3.0 (2x)
Accessory Ports
USB-C (1x)
Cable Length
5m
Tracking
SteamVR Tracking 1.0 or 2.0 (external beacons)
On-board Cameras
None
Input
SteamVR Tracking controllers
On-board Audio
None
Optional Audio
Audio Strap accessory, USB-C audio output
Microphone
Yes (2x)
Pass-through view
No
Weight
170–185g
MSRP
$1,000
MSRP (with tracking & controllers)
$1,580
Custom-made
Bigscreen is building something unique, quite literally—every Beyond headset comes with a custom-made facepad. And this isn’t a ‘choose one of three options’ situation, Bigscreen has a sleek app that walks buyers through the process of capturing a 3D scan of their face so the company can create a completely unique facepad that conforms to each specific customer.
And it really makes a difference. The first thing that Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar showed me during a demo of the Beyond headset was the difference between my personal facepad (which the company created for me prior to our meetup) and someone else’s facepad. The difference was instantly obvious; where mine fit against my face practically like two connected puzzle-pieces, the other facepad awkwardly disagreed with my face in various places. While I’ve recognized for a long time that different facial topology from person-to-person is a real consideration for VR headsets, this made me appreciate even more how significant the differences can be.
The facepad may look rough, but it’s actually made of a soft rubber material | Photo by Road to VR
Shankar says the custom-fit facepad is an essential part of making such a small headset. It ensures not only that the headset is as comfortable as it can be, but also the user’s eyes are exactly where they’re supposed to be with regard to the lenses. For a headset like Beyond, which uses high magnification pancake optics with a small sweet spot, this is especially important. And, as Shankar convincingly demonstrated by shining a flashlight all around the headset while I was wearing it, the custom-fit facepad means absolutely no external light can be seen from inside.
And the custom facepad isn’t the only way each headset is dialed in for each specific customer; instead of wasting weight and space with the mechanics for an IPD adjustment, the headset ships with one of 15 fixed IPD distances, ranging from 58–72mm. The company selects the IPD based on the same face scan that allows them to make the custom facepad. And given the size of the Beyond headset, there’s no way that glasses will fit inside; luckily the company will also sell magnetically attached prescription inserts for those who need them, up to −10 diopter.
Diving In
With my custom facepad easily snapped onto the headset with magnets, it was time to dive into VR.
The baseline version of the $1,000 Bigscreen Beyond headset has a simple soft strap, which I threw over the back of my head and tightened to taste. I felt I had to wear the strap very high on the back of my head for a good hold; Shankar says an optional top-strap will be available, which ought to allow me to wear the rear strap in a lower position.
Photo by Road to VR
As I put on the headset I found myself sitting in a dark Bigscreen theater environment, and the very first thing I noticed was the stellar darks and rich colors that are thanks to the headset’s OLED displays. The second thing I noticed was there was no sound! That’s because the baseline version of the headset doesn’t have on-board audio, so I still had to put on a pair of headphones after the headset was donned.
While the baseline headset lacks on-board audio, Bigscreen is offering a $100 ‘Audio Strap‘, which is a rigid headstrap with built-in speakers. As someone who really values rigid straps and on-board audio, I’m glad to see this as an option—for me it would be the obvious choice. Unfortunately the company wasn’t ready to demo the Audio Strap.
Shankar toured me around a handful of VR environments that showed off the headset’s 2,560 × 2,560 (6.5MP) per-eye displays, which offered a level of clarity similar to that of Varjo’s $2,000 Aero headset, but with a smaller notably field-of-view (Bigscreen claims 90°H × 93°V).
On many current-gen headsets like Quest 2 you can’t quite see the individual lines of the screen-door effect, but it’s still clear that it’s there in aggregate. While the Beyond headset isn’t ‘retina resolution’ there’s essentially no evidence of any screen-door effect. Everything looks really sharp. This was best demonstrated when I ran around in Half-Life: Alyx and the game felt like it had instantly upgraded graphics compared to a headset like Valve’s Index.
There is, however, some persistence blurring and glare. Shankar openly demonstrated how the brightness of the display directly relates to the level of persistence. While there’s some noticeable persistence at the default brightness, when overdriving the display’s brightness the persistence becomes entirely unbearable. The reverse is true; turning the brightness down below the default cuts the persistence down noticeably. While it would be nice if the default brightness had less persistence, at least users will be able to trade brightness for lower persistence based on their specific preference.
Having been exclusively building VR games since 2013, nDreams stands as one of the most veteran VR-exclusive game studios to date. And with more than 200 people, one of the largest too. The studio’s CEO & founder, Patrick O’Luanaigh, continues to bet his company’s future on the success of VR.
Speaking exclusively to Road to VR ahead of a presentation at GDC 2023, Patrick O’Luanaigh talks about the growing success of nDreams and why he’s still doubling down on VR.
Starting in 2013, O’Luanaigh has navigated his company from the earliest days of the modern VR era to now, which he believes is VR’s biggest moment so far—and growing.
Between the company’s own internal data and some external sources, O’Luanaigh estimates that VR’s install base is around 40 million headsets across the major platforms, excluding the recently launched PSVR 2. At least half of that, he estimates, is made up by 20 million Quest headsets.
That’s why he’s bulked up the company to some 200 employees, nearly doubling over the course of 2022 through hiring and studio acquisitions.
O’Luanaigh says, “this is the biggest we’ve ever been and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. […] In a decade of exclusively making VR games, we’ve never seen that growth before.”
O’Luanaigh knows well that content is key for getting players into their headsets, and to that end his efforts to scale the company are about building bigger and better VR content to keep up with the growth and expectations of the install base, he says.
“Setting up our fully-remote nDreams studios, Orbital and Elevation, was significant for us in establishing a powerful basis for developing multiple projects in parallel,” he says. “It gives us the specialism to develop the variety of VR titles, across multiple genres, that the growing market now demands.”
O’Luanaigh points to nDreams developed and published titles Phantom: Covert Ops (2020), Shooty Fruity (2020), Fracked (2021), and Little Cities (2022) as some of the most successful VR games the studio has launched thus far, with Phantom: Covert Ops specifically finding “important commercial success” on Quest 2.
With the release of those titles over the years and their ongoing sales, O’Luanaigh shares that nDreams doubled its year-over-year revenue over the last 12 months. And with multiple new projects in the works, including Synapse, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, and other (unannounced) projects, he believes the company is on track to more than double annual revenue again by 2024.
Phantom: Covert Ops | Image courtesy nDreams
Though he’s leading a company of 200 employees, O’Luanaigh calls himself a “massive VR enthusiast,” and is still very clearly in touch with makes VR such a unique and compelling medium.
He says his studio aims to build around five key pillars that make for compelling VR content:
Aspirational roleplay – first-person embodiment of appealing roles or characters
High-agency interaction – tactile 1:1 mechanics in a freely explorable world
Empowering wielding – Feel, hold, and use visceral weapons, tools, and abilities
Emotional amplification – Immersive situations that provoke strong, diverse feelings
Fictional teleportation – Presence within desirable locations, inaccessible in real life
And while O’Luanaigh could easily steer this studio away from VR—to chase a larger non-VR market—he continues to double down on VR as the studio’s unique advantage. Far from moving away from VR, his company is actively trying to bring others into the fold; O’Luanaigh says nDreams continues to expand its publishing operations.
“The success of Little Cities, which has just launched its free ‘Little Citizens’ update, has been a great validation of our investments into third-party publishing and we are actively on the lookout for more amazing indie developers to work with.”
With the scale that VR has now reached, O’Luanaigh believes the market is truly viable for indie developers. And that’s why he’s glad to see the rise of VR publishers (and not just his own company); having the benefit of longstanding expertise in the medium is crucial to shipping a shipping a quality VR title, and that’s why O’Luanaigh believes VR-specific publishers like nDreams will play an important role in bringing more developers and great content to VR.
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That expertise is increasingly building upon itself in the company’s VR games which have shown impressive mechanical exploration, giving the studio the chance to test lots of VR gameplay to find out what works.
Few in VR have had the gall to prove out something as seemingly wacky as a ‘VR kayak shooter’ and actually take it to market in a large scale production like Phantom: Covert Ops. And you can clearly see the lineage of a game like nDreams’ Fracked shining through in upcoming titles like Synapse. Though the game is an entirely new IP and visual direction, the unique Fracked cover system is making the leap to Synapse; a clear example of leveraging a now battle-tested mechanic to enhance future titles. But more than just a reskin of a prior shooter, nDreams continues to experiment with unique VR mechanics, this time promising to harness the power of PSVR 2’s eye-tracking to give players compelling telekinetic powers.
Synapse | Image courtesy nDreams
To that end, the studio’s lengthy experience in the medium is clearly an asset—and one that can only be earned rather than bought. Where exactly that experience will take them in the long run is unclear, but even after all the ups and downs the industry has seen, O’Luanaigh and nDreams remain all-in on VR.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of March 2023.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
It’s been over a week since PSVR 2 made its big launch, bringing with it 40+ games that let you dive head-first into virtual worlds aplenty. Here we take a look at our top titles you should think about nabbing first.
There’s a good smattering of games here to get you started which span a number of genres, including shooter, horror, adventure, platforming, and more. Here’s our selection of top PSVR 2 games at the moment, listed in alphabetical order.
Demeo
Demo isn’t DnD in VR like some would have you think, but the team-based tactical dungeon crawler certainly takes a bunch of cues from the storied role-playing game with its turn-based fantasy madness. Sit down to the game board with three other players and take on dungeon after dungeon, culminating in module bosses that will truly test your abilities. In the end, Demeo is basically PSVR 2’s premium board game experience truly worthy of an oragnized game night for both your VR headset-owning and flatscreen pals thanks to integrated cross-play.
You don’t need to own a dedicated steering wheel peripheral to play Gran Turismo 7 in its optional VR mode, but you would be highly suggested to do so, as this real-world driving sim lets you go head-to-head online and in an engaging campaign that simply blows Gran Turismo Sport out of the water.
Come for the graphics, stay for the VR native gameplay in this single player adventure as Horizon Call of the Mountain takes players on a fun trek throughout a breathtaking world, showcasing some of the best graphics you’ll find anywhere in VR. Beyond the epic vistas, the game’s smaller details—like rich foliage, an array of climbing gadgets, and interactive props—make Call of the Mountain a very immersive game. There’s also a free demo.
Studio Ghibli doesn’t make VR games, although you’d swear Hayao Miyazaki had a hand in designing this incredibly infectious puzzle game, which arms you with a fleet of your own mechanical clones to compete complex tasks. Save the tree, which holds biodiversity of the whole universe, and stock up on tissue as this narrative-based puzzler may jerk a tear or two.
PSVR 2 is so much better geared for room-scale gaming than the original PSVR, which is why you should definitely start thinking of your headset as a piece of workout equipment since you can dive, duck, dodge, and punch your way to the new, fitter you. Coaches take you through 50+ heart-pumping workouts, all set to tracks from artist like Noam Dee, Fas Fash, & more.
You could pick up either, but you really should consider plonking down for the Moss& Moss Book II bundle. The main character is Quill, a young mouse with dreams of greatness beyond the confines of her forest settlement, although you actually play as ‘The Reader’, who not only controls little Quill as she platforms throughout the lush fantasy world, but physically helps her by interacting with environmental puzzle pieces. Between bashing baddies, make sure to look around a bit and take in the universe’s charming and detailed visuals.
“Isn’t ‘X shooter’ game in VR yet?” you may ask yourself. Well, Pavlov is a great alternative if you’re looking for competitive Counter Strike-esque gameplay, replete with immersive gun physics and bomb-defusing action. There’s a ton of modes that will give you a good helping of sqaud-based gameplay with modern weaponry, but also vehicle-based WWII battles and zombie horde-shooting modes to keep things fresh.
Resident Evil Village may be a VR-optional game, but this single player horror game truly feels at home on PSVR 2, as the world’s blood-chilling enemies and atmospheric world take hold of you. In our hands-on, Road to VR’s Ben Lang called it “about the best graphics in VR I’d argue the top title is certainly Half-Life: Alyx.” Thankfully, if you already own the game on PS5, you not only get a free PSVR 2 upgrade, but also a PSVR 2-accessible demo.
Song in the Smoke is an unforgiving survival adventure which challenges the player to get through each day in the face of hunger, cold, fatigue, and plenty of beasts that lurk in the shadows. Visuals get a big upgrade on PSVR 2 version, making it rival the PC VR version, bringing a finer touch to the game’s large and complex levels. Keep your map open, make sure to scrounge basic supplies and craft (re: everything), survive the night, and tango with some pretty epic primeval bosses.
Initially born on Quest as a trilogy, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge Enhanced Edition casts you as a Droid Repair Technician who crash landed on Batuu, where you face off against the Guavian Death Gang, infiltrate a First Order facility and travel to other eras in the galaxy. Sure, you’re not a Jedi, but there’s no bigger slice of Star Wars VR action on PSVR 2. Yes, we’re still waiting on Vader Immortal and Squadrons, but at least Galaxy’s Edge has a free demo!
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of February 2023.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
More than six years after its VR debut, Sony is ready to bring next-gen VR to PS5 with PSVR 2. Does PlayStation VR 2 make a substantial improvement over its predecessor? And how does it stack up to other VR headsets on the market? Read on to find out.
With PSVR 2, Sony is not just improving on the prior headset, it’s also raising some bars for consumer headsets overall as the first device in its class to bring eye-tracking, HDR, and new haptic capabilities to the market. Let’s start out with a look at PSVR 2’s specs and how they compare to the original PSVR:
PSVR 2 vs. PSVR Specs
PSVR 2
PSVR
Resolution
2,000 x 2,040 (4.1MP) per-eye, OLED, HDR
960 x 1,080 (1.0MP) per-eye, RGB OLED
Refresh Rate
90Hz, 120Hz
90Hz, 120Hz
Lenses
Fresnel
Single element non-Fresnel
Field-of-view (claimed)
110° (diagonal presumed)
100° (diagonal presumed)
Optical Adjustments
IPD, eye-relief
Eye-relief
Connectors
USB-C (no breakout box)
USB, HDMI (breakout box)
Cable Length
4.5m
4.4m
Tracking
Inside-out (no external beacons)
Outside-in (external camera)
On-board cameras
4x IR (external), 2x IR (internal)
None
Pass-through View
Yes
No
Input
PSVR 2 Sense controllers (rechargable), DualShock 5 (rechargable) eye-tracking
One of the most important parts of a VR headset is how things look when you peer through the lenses, so that’s where we’re going to start.
Clarity
Photo by Road to VR
How good things look inside of a VR headset depends on much more than just resolution, so we like to boil things down to the point of talking about ‘clarity’, ie: how clear does the virtual world look inside the headset.
PSVR 2 gets a big jump in clarity over its predecessor thanks first and foremost to a big leap in resolution (from 1.0MP per-eye to 4.1MP per-eye). From a resolution standpoint, that puts PSVR 2 on par with other headsets on the market like Quest 2.
While the image through PSVR 2’s lenses certainly looks much better than the original PSVR, it’s hampered a bit by two notable issues: sweet spot and motion blur.
PSVR 2’s Fresnel lenses actually have fairly good edge-to-edge clarity, but only if you can get your eyes in the headset’s rather small eye-box (AKA sweet spot). Unfortunately not everyone will be able to get their eyes into the ideal position because the sweet spot seems to be designed at a distance that makes it so you’d have to cram the headset uncomfortably against your face in order to keep the lenses in the perfect spot. Thanks to an eye-relief adjustment it’s easy to move the lenses far enough away that they aren’t crushing your nose, but for every little bit that you do you give up some sharpness on the edges and some field-of-view.
The small eye-box also means that if you don’t dial the headsets ergonomic adjustments in just right you’ll see things like chromatic aberration and more blur around the edges than you would otherwise.
Thankfully Sony has included a guided calibration step (which makes use of the headset’s eye-tracking) and helps users find that ideal spot by guiding them toward the correct IPD and lens alignment. This definitely helps reduce the issue of having a small sweet spot, and I find myself running calibration every few times that I pick up the headset just to be sure things haven’t jostled out of place. Luckily Sony has made it easy to run the calibration step at any point—even in the middle of a game.
I also mentioned motion blur as something that’s holding back the clarity on PSVR 2. I still don’t know exactly why I’m seeing a fair bit of motion blur on PSVR 2—whether its persistence blur, ghosting, reprojection, or something else—but it somwhat reduces the sharpness of the image whenever your head is in motion (which in VR is most of the time). It’s a shame because you can see just how sharp everything is when you head is still, and then as soon as you go to look at something else, the world around you becomes a bit more blurry.
And unfortunately PSVR 2’s Fresnel lenses aren’t an exception to the rule: its still easy to spot god rays and some glare in high contrast scenes.
Displays & HDR
Photo by Road to VR
Sweet spot issues aside, PSVR 2 is packing a pair of impressive OLED displays that make colors feel more rich and saturated while allowing dark parts of the scene to get truly dark instead of just dark grey.
This makes a big difference when it comes to content like Horizon Call of the Mountain which aims to immerse players in a world full of lush scenery.
While it’s great to have OLED black levels on a modern headset, PSVR 2’s displays do suffer from more mura than seen on its contemporaries, which manifests as a bit of speckling on the screen that’s more visible when seen against certain colors.
But that’s the price you pay for those deep blacks and purported ‘HDR’ capabilities, though I’ve yet to hear Sony confirm key parts of that capability, like peak brightness.
In my experience with the headset I can’t say I’ve felt like its showing significantly more peak brightness than other headsets, but it feels like the HDR is paying off more in the mid and lower tones.
Field-of-view
Photo by Road to VR
Similar to the small sweet spot, PSVR 2’s field-of-view is technically quite large—at times feeling like it meets even Valve’s Index—but that’s only if you can push the lenses exceptionally (and for me, uncomfortably) close to your eyes; so close that the lenses are putting a lot of pressure on your nose. Between where it’s actually comfortable for me to have the lenses sit and where I would get the maximum field-of-view, it feels like I’m leaving a non-trivial amount of FoV on the table. That said, even the comfortable position leaves me with a fairly sizable field-of-view that exceeds something like Quest 2.
IPD & Eye-tracking
Photo by Road to VR
PSVR 2 is the first consumer VR headset to ship with eye-tracking. While this has the potential to be very useful across a range of applications, I’ve yet to see any game that’s putting it to seriously good use. So far the closest any game has come is Horizon Call of the Mountain which uses eye-tracking to improve the accuracy of the game’s subtle auto-aim.
For its part, Sony is making use of the eye-tracking to help users set their correct IPD (which is very useful, especially considering the headset’s small sweet spot), and even adjust the tilt of the headset on the user’s head.
While I appreciate that smart touch, I wish the calibration step would actually provide a number to accompany the IPD setting; that way you could simply remember your number and dial it in every time. Instead, the guided calibration just shows a visual indicator of how close your eyes are to the center of the lenses. It works well, but without a number to go by you need to dial things in visually every time.
With Horizon Call of the Mountain, Sony is hoping to have an exclusive big-budget VR game to entice players to the new PSVR 2. Does the title succeed? Read on to find out.
Horizon Call of the Mountain Details:
Available On: PSVR 2 Release Date: February 22nd, 2023 Price: $60 Developer: Geurilla Games & Firesprite Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Editor’s Note: The clips in this review that were captured from PSVR 2 do not look correctly saturated due to incorrect HDR downmixing on our part. Rest assured, the world of Horizon Call of the Mountain is quite vibrant!
Gameplay
The first thing you should know about Horizon Call of the Mountain is that at its core, it’s a VR climbing game. While it’s obvious from the name that climbing would be part of the experience, I can’t say I realized that it would make up about 50-60% of the gameplay. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing; climbing in Call of the Mountain is well executed and creates perfect situations to showcase the game’s stunning environmental art.
The second thing you should know about Call of the Mountain is that it really is a full game and not just a collection of mini-games or one-off experiences. That includes a cast of characters with performances that developers Guerrilla and Firesprite clearly spent a lot of time on, with results that challenge the groundbreaking portrayal of virtual humans in Blood & Truth (2019).
Climbing is the central pillar of gameplay in Call of the Mountain; at first you’ll be using just your hands, but later you’ll find new tools that do a good job of mixing up the climbing gameplay just enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, though I wish the later equipment felt less redundant.
While the climbing systems work very well throughout, I found a near complete lack of challenge in the climbing gameplay; I don’t think I fell to my death a single time during the game. The only ‘challenge’ is occasionally needing to look around to find out where to make your next move, but there’s barely any real ‘threat’ during climbing segments, which would have served well to emphasize the game’s otherwise daring climbs.
The climbing may not throw any real challenges your way, but it certainly creates effective opportunities to see the beautiful world of Call of the Mountain. The environmental art and lighting direction in the game is seriously top notch and of a quality scarcely seen anywhere else in VR. You’ll come across vista after epic vista as you climb to new heights, and it always felt worth it to me to take a minute to soak in the views. From most vantage points you can make out other major landmarks in the game which helps make the whole thing feel like a cohesive world.
While climbing is a huge part of the game, you’ll also be doing a lot of bow shooting, which is also well executed in function and feeling. To that end, the combat is where the game really challenges players, and I was actually surprised just how difficult it can be. While I only died from a single encounter in the game, the combat definitely put my skills to the test in a way that I expect would be fairly difficult for inexperienced VR players. While there’s options to tweak the difficulty, unfortunately they’re somewhat hidden in the Accessibility menu which means some players might not find them given that they may be looking for a more common ‘difficulty selector’ as some games provide.
Instead of throwing enemy after enemy at you, combat in Call of the Mountain most often consists of very specific encounters with a set number and type of enemies. The game also takes on a totally unique form of locomotion when these fights start, where the player can swing their arms to quickly rotate around the outer edge of the combat space as they avoid attacks and look for new angles to attack from. While it might look strange from the outside, the overall concept works well, especially when you’re fighting some of the game’s biggest and baddest beasts.
Granted, I found it difficult to read and time the enemies’ melee attacks, and I didn’t feel like the ‘dodge’ mechanic (where you swing both your controllers to one side to do a quick strafe) worked particularly well. While I applaud the developers for building a unique and thoughtful combat system that’s specific to VR (and impressively comfortable, I should add), it could use a bit more refinement to really shine.
The same goes for the combat overall. While it’s definitely fun to fight the fascinating machine creatures from the world of Horizon—thanks to their excellent looks and sounds—combat never felt particularly strategic to me. For the most part you just need to keep lobbing arrows down range. That’s especially strange considering the game allows you to craft several different arrow types (like fire and ice), but all of them essentially just felt like extra damage rather than a strategic choice. That’s compounded by the fact that the game provides the player with more than enough resources to usually have their special arrows maxed out—which further meant that actually finding those resources didn’t feel very exciting.
While Call of the Mountain is a linear adventure, you’ll return to a hub area between missions where you’ll get to talk to the game’s small cast of characters. Although there’s unfortunately minimal character development and intrigue, the characters themselves are impressively rendered across the board, from the way they look to the way they move to the way they sound. It’s a shame they aren’t more involved in the game because they’re so technically compelling.
When you’re on the trail but not actively climbing or fighting, there’s usually loot to scavenge for. The game does a good job of leaving extra bits of loot for those that go looking, but since the only gameplay reward is ingredients for different arrows (which as we established, don’t really make the combat more unique) or a small upgrade to your health it can be a bit of a let down to keep finding the same stuff that you’ve already got plenty of.
Even if you’re full on arrows though, the game still peppers its pathways with little collectibles to find for those who are looking more closely at the world around them, as well as hidden targets for you to shoot (which I appreciate because this gives players another good reason to take in the environment at large). Some of the game’s levels also have optional (and sometimes hidden) ‘Legendary Climbs’, which are longer climbing segments that usually lead you to another awesome view, and these feel like a good reason to replay a level if you didn’t find them the first time around.
Call of the Mountain is a fun adventure with tons of VR native gameplay taking place inside one of the best looking virtual worlds seen in VR to date. I can’t say the story really grasped me—I completely missed why the protagonist and his brother are at odds with one another—but at least it’s all well delivered and ties the gameplay together. It took me about 7 hours and 30 minutes to complete the main campaign while finding roughly 60% of the extras like trophies, collectables, and Legendary Climbs.
While it isn’t particularly comprehensive, the game also has a small challenge area where you can test your bow and climbing skills with some timed challenges. And last but not least, there’s also the ‘Machine Safari’, which is an extended version of the opening sequence which shows off the game’s great looking creatures and animations in a non-interactive way (great as a short demo to show friends who aren’t gamers).
Immersion
Image courtesy PlayStation
Call of the Mountain is definitely easy to get lost in thanks to its beautiful visuals and solid-feeling world. Yes, you’ll come across a bunch of epic vistas to soak in, but the game also does a great job with the smaller details too. You’ll see nice touches like moss growing between rocks, glints of crystal flecks in some of the rock faces, and a ton of foliage and environmental decoration, all backed up by great lighting and art direction.
While it was a bummer to find that only some of the foliage was interactive, it did make me smile when I could naturally use my hand to push a vine away from my face, see fuzzy moss bend under my hands, and watch leaves move realistically as I grazed them while looking for my next hand-hold.
Overall, Call of the Mountain might have the best visuals of any VR game I’ve seen to date. Though I’d say Half-Life: Alyx still has the more technically proficient graphics, those graphics are largely in service of realizing a dirty, broken, dystopic city. Call of the Mountain, on the other hand, offers up a rich world full of natural beauty that’s a delight to see.
Beyond the interactive foliage, the developers also scattered lots of interactive props throughout the environment. While they have nothing to do with gameplay, they’re certainly tempting to play with. Though I can’t even recall the name of the game’s main antagonist, I do recall playing a tambourine, drums, a pan flute, finding various hand-made dolls, smashing a table full of pots with a hammer, ringing huge gongs with a mallet, throwing snowballs, and shooting vases off a steep ledge with my bow. All of these various props are detailed with their own sound effects, physics, and generally tight hit-boxes.
While it was great to see that all of these items were physically interactive and could be pushed appropriately with your hands, the physics would sometimes freak out when items interacted with each other (ie: putting a stick in a mug).
Also relating to item interactions, I was a little disappointed to see that Call of the Mountain lacks a proficient force-grab system (which is essentially standard in VR games today). While you technically can grab things with a bit of range, it was really hard to see exactly which item you are targeting, which would sometimes mean grabbing something other than what you had intended. And then there’s the fact that when grabbing distant items, your floating hand in many cases would fly away to meet the object, which certainly doesn’t look right. And all of this sometimes makes picking things up from the ground an annoyance.
A more thoughtful force-grab system would have been welcomed; it’s easy to imagine emulating the gravity glove system from Half-Life: Alyx, and either explain it away by saying it’s advanced technology from the Old Ones (the futuristic lost civilization of the game), or by creating an (admittedly contrived) version of the gloves using string and pulleys. I also would have liked to put items over my shoulder to stash them in my inventory instead of having them magically teleport there after touching them once.
One place where Call of the Mountain really went above and beyond in the immersion department is with its characters. Yes, they look great, they’re well voiced, and the facial capture is very expressive, etc., but the thing that really impressed me is the way the developers dealt with players reaching out and touching the characters.
In many games if you reach out to touch a character nothing happens (maybe your hand even clips through them), which breaks immersion. Other games will just keep the characters 10 feet away from you, but that can also kill immersion because they’re outside of your ‘personal space’ (making you feel less connected with them).
Call of the Mountain keeps the characters in that personal space, but if you reach out to touch them they will lean away from your hand while sneering at you in a way that feels really natural. And when I say natural, I mean the expression on their face—and the way they first look at your hand and then back at you—very effectively conveys a sense of ‘what the hell is wrong with you, why are you touching me’ without using any words at all. It’s such a minor detail but it’s incredibly well done, especially considering that this system is fully dynamic so it can happen regardless of how they’re gesturing, looking, or speaking. Whoever worked on this system and the accompanying body language and animations, bravo, you’ve set a new bar for the ‘players touching characters in VR’ problem.
Comfort
Though there’s plenty of motion in Call of the Mountain, the game is clearly designed to take comfort into consideration.
First and foremost, the game has a solid ‘arm swinger’ locomotion option which is the default for two of the three pre-configured comfort profiles. I found that it kept me more comfortable and felt more immersive than using pure stick movement—though it was just a little bit annoying that it slows you down so much when you come within a few feet of stationary objects like walls or rocks.
In addition to the arm swinger movement, the game has a dynamic blinder system that kicks in when there’s lots of motion, like when you’re jumping, climbing, ziplining, or falling, and I found that it did a great job of keeping me comfortable.
In addition to offering up three pre-configured comfort profiles ranging from lots of comfort accommodations to fewer accommodations, you can also go into the menu and fine-tune the settings to taste. The game also thoughtfully includes an ‘Arm Reach Multiplier’ option for anyone that needs it, either because you don’t feel like reaching as far, or because there’s a physical reason you’re unable to.
As with any VR game involving climbing, when you clasp a handhold you can effectively shake your own body around by waggling your arm; some of the very sensitive folks are likely to find this movement inherently uncomfortable, regardless of blinders. So if you are particularly sensitive to motion in VR, you might want to give this game a shot but be ready to take advantage of Sony’s PlayStation Store refund policy if you can’t handle the motion comfortably.
Below you can find the full list of comfort options in Horizon Call of the Mountain.
Horizon Call of the Mountain’ Comfort Settings – February 16th, 2023
Ahead of the launch of PSVR 2, we’ve got a close-up look at the finished version of the headset and what you can expect to find when you crack open the box.
It’s just two weeks until Sony’s newest VR headset hits the streets, and while we’re not yet allowed to go into detail, today we’ve got a close-up look at the production hardware and Sony’s official controller dock. Stay tuned for our full PSVR 2 review.
Photo by Road to VR
The very first thing to notice about PSVR 2 compared to the original is the simplicity of setup… this is everything you’ll see in the box.
PSVR 2 | Photo by Road to VR
Compare that to the original PSVR which had a breakout box requiring extra cables and its own power adapter—not to mention the PS Eye camera that was required for the headset (and the photo below doesn’t even include the Move controllers).
PSVR 1 | Photo by Road to VR
Compared to the original, PSVR 2’s single-cable operation and inside-out tracking makes it so much easier to use.
Getting closer to the headset itself, we get a good look at its range of adjustments. On the top there’s an IPD dial for dialing in the distance between the lenses. Also on top is a button to adjust eye-relief (the range of which is pretty impressive). And on the back is the crank to tighten the headstrap, with the center of the crank acting as a button which releases the springy tension.
As we learned in our early preview of PSVR 2, the headset has an assisted calibration step which helps the user hone in their individual headset orientation and IPD settings, thanks to the in-built eye-tracking.
On the bottom of the headset is the power button and a button to activate PSVR 2’s passthrough view. Alongside those is the built-in microphone.
Photo by Road to VR
While PSVR 2 doesn’t have directly integrated audio, it comes with a pair of custom earbuds which attached to the underside of the rear headstrap and stow in little holes at the sides of the headset. You can use your own 3.5mm headphones instead if you’d like to.
And then there’s the PSVR 2 ‘Sense’ controllers, which have a particularly interesting shape to them. Inside the circular strut is hidden infrared LEDs which can be seen by the headset to track the controllers.
Compared to something like Quest 2, the unique shape and placement of the ring does a good job of reducing the likelihood that you’ll bump the controllers into each other during hand-to-hand interactions. However, the design has a somewhat off-kilter balance to it.
The wrist-straps are mounted on the inside of the tracking ring and can be removed if desired.
The PSVR 2 controllers are rechargeable via USB-C, but Sony is also selling a purpose-built PSVR 2 controller charging dock to make it easy to charge your controllers without fiddling with cables. While its existence is appreciated, and it generally gets the job done, it’s a bit funky to sit the controllers in just the right spot to initiate the charge. Still, I’d rather this than plugging in two cables every time I’m done playing.
We’re looking forward to sharing our full PSVR 2 review in the near future—if you’ve got questions for us, drop them in the comments below!
PlayStation VR 2 is just around the corner, and by this point Sony detailed all of the headsets core specs and features. Comparing PSVR vs. PSVR 2 specs side-by-side shows us how much has changed since Sony’s first consumer headset released in 2016.
Update (February 6th, 2023): With PSVR 2 launch day just around the corner, we’ve updated this spec sheet and commentary with the latest info, now including PSVR 2’s weight and cable length.
Among the major players in the VR space, Sony has bided its time on a follow-up to the original headset. By the time PSVR 2 releases on February 22nd, 2023, it will have been six years and four months since the original PSVR released back in 2016.
The original PSVR was released about six months after the first major consumer VR headsets—HTC Vive and Oculus Rift—hit the market back in 2016. However HTC, Oculus, and others have released many new headsets in the interim. To its credit, PSVR managed to feel competitive for many years after its release, but eventually began to feel dated as the rest of the pack charged ahead into VR’s ‘gen-2’ epoch.
Now here we are in 2023 with PSVR 2 on PS5 set to bring new life to Sony’s VR ambitions. Let’s take a look at how PSVR and PSVR 2 specs compare:
PSVR vs. PSVR 2 Specs
PSVR 2
PSVR
Resolution
2,000 x 2,040 (4.1MP) per-eye, OLED, HDR
960 x 1,080 (1.0MP) per-eye, RGB OLED
Refresh Rate
90Hz, 120Hz
90Hz, 120Hz
Lenses
Fresnel
Single element non-Fresnel
Field-of-view (claimed)
110° (diagonal presumed)
100° (diagonal presumed)
Optical Adjustments
IPD, eye-relief
Eye-relief
Connectors
USB-C (no breakout box)
USB, HDMI (breakout box)
Cable Length
4.5m
4.4m
Tracking
Inside-out (no external beacons)
Outside-in (external camera)
On-board cameras
4x IR (external), 2x IR (internal)
None
Pass-through View
Yes
No
Input
PSVR 2 Sense controllers (rechargable), DualShock 5 (rechargable) eye-tracking
It’s easy to get lost in the numbers so let’s really break down the major changes between the headsets.
Resolution, Field-of-view, & HDR
For one, PSVR 2 has about four times the pixel count of PSVR. All things being equal, that means images inside the headset would look about four times sharper, which is a substantial improvement.
However, we know that all things won’t be equal. Sony quotes the field-of-view of PSVR 2 at 110° compared to 100° for PSVR 1. That means that while PSVR 2 has many more pixels, they’ll be stretched over a slightly wider area. Overall the sharpness of the headset should still be substantially better, but not quite as much as the sheer increase in pixels would suggest.
As for the field-of-view itself, 100° to 110° isn’t a huge leap, but you’d surely notice it if you compared the headsets side-by-side.
Unless a surprise headset beats it to the punch, PSVR 2 will be the first commercially available VR headset to launch with an HDR (high-dynamic range) display. That means it’s capable of a much wider range of brightness than a typical headset. Functionally this means the headset will be able to produce scenes with more life-like brightness which in theory could improve immersion considerably.
Granted, in our PSVR 2 preview we didn’t clearly notice the headset’s HDR capabilities, though it isn’t clear if the games on display had been optimized for the feature yet. Another possibility is that the HDR mode simply may have the kind of peak brightness you’d see from an HDR TV. So at this point it’s unclear if HDR will be a ‘nice to have’ feature, or something that defines the headset compared to its contemporaries.
The original PSVR was for a long time the only major headset on the market that didn’t use Fresnel lenses, which are known to cause glare (in exchange for other benefits). PSVR 2, on the other hand, will be following the rest of the industry which has long moved to Fresnel lenses as the industry standard.
The lenses in the original PSVR had a large enough eye-box that Sony didn’t feel the need to include an IPD adjustment (which adjusts the lenses to match the distance between your eyes). However, PSVR 2 does have an IPD adjustment which is a good idea for many reasons, so we’re glad to see this addition. Meanwhile, PSVR 2 retains the eye-relief feature found on the original PSVR, which is useful for dialing in the most comfortable view and to make room for those with glasses.
Ease-of-use & Tracking
Even though this reads minimally on a spec sheet, this is a huge deal for PSVR 2—no more breakout box and no more external camera.
PSVR 1 setup diagram | image courtesy Sony
PSVR 1 ships with a large breakout box that accepts two plugs from the headset that run along a thick cable. The breakout box has to be connected to the host console by a USB cable and an HDMI cable (and also has to be plugged into the TV). And don’t forget that it needs its own power supply. That’s six… yes, six, individual plugs running into and out of the box.
Needless to say, the breakout box was a bit of a pain. Not only did it complicate the user’s A/V set up, in some cases it even created resolution and HDR issues for certain TVs; this was partly fixed with a later revision to the PSVR hardware, but even so the breakout box was a hindrance to the overall experience.
Oh and don’t forget about the camera. PSVR 1 required the PS4 camera for tracking, which meant having another peripheral plugged into your console. Not only that, but the camera was never made for VR in the first place and it suffered from poor tracking accuracy and limited coverage.
PS4 Camera | Image courtesy Sony
Sony has identified and eliminated these issues for PSVR 2. The breakout box is completely gone; the headset will plug into the PS5 with a single USB-C cable through the USB-C port conveniently placed right on the front of the PS5. That’s great news but we surely hope that little connector can hold the cable in tightly enough to not get yanked out if the cord gets tugged during intense VR sessions!
Image courtesy Sony
And the PS4 camera is gone too. Instead of using ‘outside-in’ tracking with a camera that sits on your TV, PSVR 2 has on-board cameras for ‘inside-out’ tracking. That means the cameras on the headset itself are used to track the player’s head movements. This eliminates another extra peripheral compared to PSVR 1.
But there’s a risk in Sony’s move to inside-out tracking. The quality of inside-out tracking varies greatly between headset makers. While the inside-out tracking on Quest 2, for instance, is very good, the inside-out tracking on Windows VR headsets leaves much to be desired. Only a handful of companies in the world have shown that they can deliver top-tier inside-out tracking for VR.
Granted, the bar is pretty low in this case. Tracking on PSVR 1 was arguably the worst among major headsets on the market, but it still sold very well regardless. Even if PSVR 2 has just ‘ok’ inside-out tracking, it could still be an improvement over the poor tracking of the original.
All that said, Sony tends to be pretty serious about VR, and I expect they’ll have a decent solution for inside-out tracking, if not a very good one.
Guest Article by Rune Skovbo Johansen
