The imminent launch of PS VR 2 brings us to a series of questions related not only to its future, but also to its approach and its origin. All of this leads us to be skeptical of the huge expectation they generate, especially at launch. Are things really as they are painted or is there more than meets the eye?
If we look at the history of PlayStation since its inception, it is undoubtedly a success story. However, there are ghosts in the form of business fiascos that no one remembers anymore. The first PS VR were and the new glasses were about not to appear. Plus, they haven’t done it in the best possible way when it comes to the VR medium. Are you submitting the product as an add-on to your main console?
PlayStation and the fear of the second platform
One of PlayStation’s biggest problems is that it’s terrified of competing with its main console, which makes sense and is that a company can’t split its efforts and goals in half. products that compete for the interests of its users and internal resources for game development. That’s why they didn’t hesitate to give the deathblow to their PlayStation Vita, not because of the lie of mobile games, since if it were true they would have supported said platform, but because that they did not want an internal competition.
And it’s not something that concerns them exclusively, Nintendo made the same mistake when its portable console, the 3DS, began to have enough power to offer proposals in the field of television consoles. The result? Incredible fiasco of the Wii U and Nintendo Switch being a hybrid console, a clever move like Kasparov or Karpov that put them in a privileged position.
However, the PS VR 2 situation is different
Historically, the technology hasn’t worked on consoles if it didn’t come standard with the system. For example, no one would have bought the Wii Remote if it had been a Gamecube accessory and, on the other hand, despite the advantages of CDs over cartridges, it was not until consoles came with an included CD player. In any case, it is important that the integrated technology adds value to the end user, because cases such as the Kinect fiasco on Xbox One or the Wii U remote can occur, which did not give the system a perception of improvement in relation to it.
With the PS VR 2 there are two possibilities in this alternative scenario, the first is to sell the unit with the console, which causes it to overload the final price and consider it as a superfluous and forced element. The second, on the other hand, would involve following the same path as Meta with its Quest, with a similar unit, possibly a clone, but compatible with the PS5 and which will use the name of the console to sell more.
The second option seems to be the smarter and more viable one, however, it means SONY would have to split its resources to make games for the new platform. Given the staff and time resources that AAA PlayStations require, they are not interested, as it would further limit them.
Reality: PS5 wasn’t made for VR
The PS VR 2 was therefore online for a long time and the reason for this is that the console does not have optimizations for virtual reality or those that it could benefit from. In other words, we’re talking about a product that was most likely a last-minute move by Jim Ryan’s board of directors and is arriving truly outdated, not in specs and quality, but in convenience. .
What are we basing it on? Virtual reality relies on the generation of two images at the same time, one for each eye, because rendering in stereo is necessary. The PS5 GPU executes each frame in its own time, which means significant latency when generating the frames. Note that the position of the objects changes slightly from the perspective of each eye. So the whole 3D pipeline is different.
In other words, the PS5 GPU lacks the ability to virtualize itself and operate as two units running in parallel sharing resources. Another trick is to generate the geometry of the scene with one eye and deduce the position of the second eye. Which is much more efficient than a dual system, but even that hasn’t been integrated. Although, of course, these shortcomings are not just for the GPU.
Lack of specialist console units for the PS VR 2
The Qualcomm processor built into the Meta Quest 2 has a series of co-processors specialized in interpreting the position of the tracker in the controls and in the main unit. However, these units are not in the PS5 chip and therefore it is necessary to include them as standard in the HMD. The PS VR 2 therefore ends up needing a chip with its memory to work well. Which brings us to the fact that it would have been possible to make a self-contained, independent unit, but for the reasons we’ve told you, SONY isn’t interested.
If SONY had added such units to the main chip of its console, it would not have been necessary to implement them in the HMD. Simply, the information would be picked up by the sensors and would pass through the console’s USB-C cable. However, we find that it does not have enough bandwidth to do so. So that shows us that PS VR 2 was an afterthought.
Although there were a slew of patents issued by SONY itself in relation to a new virtual reality headset, its existence was nothing short of a murky and hidden project. That’s why in the middle of CES in 2021, the announcement surprised us and we know from reliable sources that more than one development study as well. What’s more, the staff responsible for developing the first PS VR left in 2018 after the commercial fiasco of the first generation.
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