PlayStation VR 2, Reviewed: The Best VR Gaming Headset if You Can Live With the Cable
Tech
Speaker 1: Seven years ago, Sony debuted the PlayStation VR on PlayStation 4 20 16. It has been a long time, but now the PlayStation five has its own VR accessory, the PlayStation VR two. Let's put this in perspective because VR has been here for a while and VR in 2023 is about to reinvent itself. First of all, a lot of the VR headsets that we see right now are wireless. Look at the Meta Quests two and the upcoming Quest three. Apple's expected headset is going to [00:00:30] go in that direction. I'm so used to wireless that it's surprising that the PlayStation VR two has a wire, a big, long cable that connects to your PlayStation five. That could seem like a turnoff, but wait, there's a lot of benefits that this headset has to offer you. Yes, it's $550, which is the cost of a PlayStation five on its own, but this headset is probably the best quality VR experience at the moment that I've had.
Speaker 1: Seriously, [00:01:00] and this is why, first of all, the PlayStation VR two headset has a really nice display. It's ole, it's hdr, it's got a high resolution that feels super crisp and it makes a lot of the gaming graphics look really vivid. Everyone we've showed into in the office has been really impressed. It has great black levels. It feels more vibrant as a result, and because it's tethered to a PlayStation five, the graphics on this are a lot better than [00:01:30] you're gonna get on a standalone headset. This thing can pump out gaming graphics that when optimized look really fantastic. There aren't that many games right now that are super optimized, and that's something I'll get into in a moment. But PlayStation has one horizon call the Mountain and that game, if you get up close and look at the details in that game, it feels like you're playing a PlayStation five game.
Speaker 1: But in vr, it doesn't feel like there's any gap in graphics anymore. That's really cool. The other thing this has is eye tracking, which [00:02:00] right now may feel more like a gimmick than a necessity, but it does do one thing that helps those graphics look good and it's called Foviated Rendering. It's basically looking at where your eye is and just sending the high res graphics to that area with eye tracking to potentially bring out even more detail through a PlayStation five to maximize gaming graphics. There are also some ways that you can actually look around and see things and select menus or even do controls like in games like Res Infinite, or Tentacular has it too. I'm sure a lot of [00:02:30] games are gonna play around with that. It's super cool and interesting technology, but it's not something I'd say you necessarily need. The other thing this headset has that's fantastic are these controllers.
Speaker 1: The PlayStation Sense controllers are what the PlayStation VR should have had all along. These are dedicated motion sensing controllers, similar to other VR headsets. Two things make this really nice though. Basically the haptics and the force feedback, the vibrating haptics and the adaptive trigger in here are like the PlayStation dual sense controller. [00:03:00] They have really advanced kind of vibrational ripple feelings, and this trigger will actually give feedback depending on what game you're playing. So if you're using like a bow and arrow, it'll actually have resistance. That's something I haven't seen in any other VR headset say, and it makes an impact when I've been playing a lot of the games. So to me, these haptics on here blow the pants off. Other VR headsets that I've used, they're really lightweight too. The one thing is they don't have a deep pad, so they're not exactly the same as a regular PlayStation controller.
Speaker 1: So they work with VR games, [00:03:30] but they don't work with all of your PlayStation five games. Speaking of games, the game library for the PlayStation VR two is actually pretty large at launch. It's like over 30 games and it looks like more and more are being added, but that doesn't mean you can play any PlayStation five game in VR obviously, although there are some games that are getting VR modes, notably Grander MO seven and Resident Evil Village, I played Resident Evil Village, looked awesome, haven't played Grander MO seven yet, but I'm going to soon. Those are ones that you [00:04:00] probably want to pick up. I'm hoping there are going to be even more. No Man's Sky is also one of those on the list, but you have to sort of check and seek for compatibility. The other thing that's a bummer is if you've had a PlayStation VR from the past, those older games are not automatically backwards compatible here.
Speaker 1: In fact, I tried launching them. They do not play unless the company decides to port over a specific adaptation. There are some games already that offer free updates or paid updates to get those games. It's a shame though, because there are [00:04:30] a lot of great PlayStation VR games in the past. A lot of exclusives, and I'm thinking about Astro Bott. Astro Bott is an awesome little cute robot that would be an introduction to a lot of PlayStation VR and PlayStation Tech. It's built into the PlayStation five. There was an Astro Bott game. There were two of them on PlayStation vr. There's no Astro Bott here. Bring us Astro Bott. You know there is Horizon Call of the Mountain, which is good. I just expected more exclusives. Now, this is coming out in February. February is not exactly a holiday shopping [00:05:00] time. Maybe this is kind of a soft launch and maybe over the course of the year, Sony will have more exclusive games, maybe leading up to a fall release of even more hopefully with some sort of a bundle cuz that gets into price.
Speaker 1: Price on this headset. It's expensive. This is $550, even though it includes the controllers. You're also gonna need a PlayStation five. That's a thousand dollars plus bundle. That is a lot of money to spend on vr. Something like the Meta quests too, as much as you may not like Meta [00:05:30] or maybe you do, that headset is $400 and it's all inclusive and it's pretty great. That's what you're going up against and it's hard to beat that because the Meta Quests two is fully standalone. It's super fun. Even if it is a few years old and the graphics don't compete, it still has a really immersive experience. This needs that tether. This is about a 15 foot cable, which is pretty good for most rooms, but I did feel this cable wearing down on my shoulder and I had to make sure I didn't [00:06:00] get tangled in it.
Speaker 1: So it's there and there are a few other things I'm not wild about with this headset. The audio needs little dangling earbuds. Now they are included and they're fine. They offer 3D audio and they attach over here and you could put in your own. But the audio to me didn't sound quite as good as I expected it to. Although if you want an audio boost, you could use Sony's own Pulse 3D audio headset that goes right over your ears. That wirelessly connects to one of the USB ports on the front and this connects [00:06:30] to the other and it sounded great, but you have to get that pulse headset separately. The other thing is this doesn't have any built-in speakers. So on the meta quests two, you can actually hear the world around you and also hear the audio near you. You have to put these buds in your ears and then you're gonna close out the real world, which maybe you want, but you're not gonna be able to hear people nearby.
Speaker 1: These do fit over my glasses, which I love. These are the best glasses friendly VR headset designed that I have seen. There's a large rubber gasket [00:07:00] and these wide glasses do not fit into the quest too. I need special dedicated glasses for that. These are no problem for eye tracking. I need to push the headset really close to get the eye tracking to work. Keep aware of that glasses owners, but I did feel the experience was great. One thing that's a little weird are the buttons on the bottom, which are your basic interface controls. Power button. This shows you the real world when you press it using the pass through cameras, which is something that's common on [00:07:30] vr, like the Quest two. I found it a little hard to fumble for this, but once you do the black and white cameras offer a nice crisp look of what's around you, and that's something that you also use when you first set up the headset.
Speaker 1: The boundary set up for this, it can scan your entire room, mesh it out with polygons, and then you set up a little play space by sort of pushing in at the boundaries and crafting it to the space that you want. Really nice design. And actually it's a little bit better than what Meta has on the Quest too. So would I [00:08:00] buy this interesting question. I think it's a lot of money to spend. I think if you already have a PlayStation five and you have the money to spend on VR and you're thinking about spending, what's gonna be at least $600 or more if you're buying the games and everything else. I think this is the most cinematic, vivid VR gaming experience that's out there, but that's a really high price bar. I mean, even in PC VR gaming, you could find more affordable headsets and be able to connect them to a pc.
Speaker 1: The Quest two is $400. [00:08:30] I'm not even gonna include the Quest Pro because that's not really meant for everyday use, but this price is high. Although the upcoming landscape of VR headsets are also going to have high prices. Everything that we've seen so far has been pushing into that thousand dollars territory. Maybe this gets bundled in the future, maybe it's more affordable. Also, do you like the idea of sitting at home tethered to a VR headset with a game console as opposed to moving around? That's something you need to solve. Although I will say one [00:09:00] nice thing about this headset being all self-contained, something the original PlayStation VR was not, is that all of the equipment needed to run, this is all here. It doesn't need an external camera, you don't need some weird breakout box. You just need a US BBC cable. And so if you plug that into your PlayStation five, once you've set it up, you don't even need a tv.
Speaker 1: You could sit down and play games on this and kind of use it to off play games when somebody else is watching television or maybe you don't have a TV in the room at all. That's kind of an [00:09:30] interesting use case for this because I found that the OLE display is definitely good enough for playing games on. Although for watching TV and movies, I would prefer still a regular television. So that's PlayStation VR two right now. And here's the thing, it's gonna keep changing, right? There're gonna be a lot more games. Really curious to see what comes out, how this continues to raise the bar. And I think the graphics quality of this, the ability for it to push those boundaries is potentially gonna change what VR becomes. [00:10:00] But I would also wait because there are probably gonna be a lot more headsets to come this year too.
