Quest 2 vs. PSVR 2: How the Leading VR Headsets Compare

Speaker 1: The PSV R two has just released and we thought it'd be a good idea to compare it to one of the other leading VR headsets. The Quest two. I've got editor at large, Scott Stein here with me and we have used both of these a fair amount and we have got a lot to go through with all these. Speaker 2: Yeah, let's dive into vr. This is a big year in vr. We got like a lot of stuff. The PSVR two is like the, the first shot, but we had the Quest Pro last year. We're expecting some sort of Apple headset by the end of the year. Uh, maybe it'll be next year. Who knows The Quest three, the follow up [00:00:30] to this is coming by the end of the year too. And then there are things like the VI XR Elite, so a lot of products, but these are the two most well-known right now and I think they're the ones that people are deciding between. Speaker 1: Yeah, and as you can tell, they look very different. Scott, can you tell me a little bit about the PSV R two and how that was kind of built? Speaker 2: I think people think of VR now. If you've seen a Quest as a standalone thing where you, you set it up, you play Beats Saber, you're doing workouts, there's nothing else attached. This is a self-contained VR headset. PSVR two is not, [00:01:00] this thing has a big cable that tethers to a PlayStation five. That is the first thing you should know. But this has advances in the VR landscape that this one doesn't. This display is really good. This display is better. This is an OLE display, this is an HDR display. It's, it's vivid. We've tried it. It really pops. The resolution is better. So that's one thing audio-wise, this has built-in headphones, which actually can be useful. You can listen to those, you know when you're, when you're doing stuff and other people are talking to [00:01:30] you, kind of resolve that. Um, it also has a headphone jack. This only has a headphone jack or built-in earbuds, um, which are fine. I didn't think they were great, but they're free. You can also plug in your own, you can also use the Pulse wireless 3d, uh, headphones, which Sony has, which sound a lot better, but they're Speaker 1: Big. And also when you're playing with the PS five, the audio will come from the TV too. Yes, in case someone's watching you play, Speaker 2: You can always, that's a good point. Or you always have that option. So if you want to do something casually and do that, [00:02:00] it just won't feel as as surround. So those are some of the differences. The controllers, everyone has these same types of controller designs at this point. So if you haven't used vr, they all have this split apart game controller concept. Everyone's resolved the idea of the triggers, the analog stick, the buttons, and both of these have built in cameras to do all the tracking. There's nothing you need to plug in anymore like the old psvr. But this feels a lot more advanced than those because of the haptics, the vibration. The vibration in here is like the ones on the dual sense, [00:02:30] the PS five controllers. It has a lot of subtlety, it has a lot of rippling feelings. This trigger has forced feedback. So we try this like if you can do archery and other things, you can feel that give to it, which gives realism. And to me all of that makes this feel more immersive. Plus this headset freaking rumbles, which is ridiculous. It's an immersive sensory experience more so than this. And I think that's who it's meant for. Speaker 1: Yeah, and when it comes to the quest too, I like to say this is like the Nintendo [00:03:00] switch of VR headsets, right? This one is an at-home console. You gotta plug it in. This one you can take on the go. They have a great carrying case. You can find some online. This is very mobile when it comes to the controller. The controller, it feels very ergonomic in your hand. I like that there is a place to lay your thumb, which I don't think is really on that one. The one thing I found on this that kind of stands out to me is that it senses when your fingers lay down on the triggers and the buttons. And I was very surprised not to see that on the psvr too. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's [00:03:30] a good point. Having that not be there. I've had games where you can still feel like you're moving your fingers, but that awareness feels a lot more present. So if you wanna reach out and grab things or get that sense of mixed reality, you know that's not here. And that also gets to another point, which is hand tracking. This has continually updated hand tracking, so you don't even have to use controllers. The precision of that is not always there, but it has a lot of uses. They're not doing that yet here. And so the whole idea is you pick up controllers and use this and, and it's not a hand tracking [00:04:00] thing. So the experience here is vivid and immersive, but it's not as flexible as what you get here with the Quest two, including mixed reality that you can do on this, even though it's using black and white pass through cameras, this is too, but they're not dipping in a mixed reality yet. On the PS five, Speaker 1: Let's also get into just like the fit of these, right? They both have different abilities to to, to shape it to your face and your eyes. Tell me about the PSVR Speaker 2: Two. Yeah, so I, I have big chunky glasses and I've had a lot [00:04:30] of problems with headsets. I have to have a separate pair of glasses that's a little smaller to fit into the quest too. This fits my big glasses. It's a big eye box here. It's very flexible. You can lower the glasses in. It has an area to control how far in and out the headset goes. Plus you've got the headband to tighten. So all of those things meant that I felt it was very comfortable even though my glasses kind of hit the lens a couple of times until I got the sweet spot. This feels much more like it's glom to your face unless you buy a separate head strap. [00:05:00] So I also find that the fit on this is more like a, like a band or visor and the thing lowers in front so it's a lot more comfortable. To me that's a big Speaker 1: Plus. I, I felt the same thing with this like coming out of the box, this one's very comfortable. Meta does have accessories that will make this more comfortable. There is an elite strap for this one that is a bit nicer than this makes it a little more ergonomic to your head or, or, or rather like shifts the weight to your head and and helps shape that. Also, one thing that was not super comfortable to me was the, just [00:05:30] the three settings for the I P D shifter. The I P D is the inter pupillary display. Uh, shaping it to your pupils, Speaker 2: Your eyes. Speaker 1: Yeah, the PSVR two, it has a longer range, not just like Speaker 2: Three you have Dial. They could actually control that Speaker 1: Hardware's nothing unless you've got good software. Now Scott, can you tell me about what software is available right now at the PSVR two? Speaker 2: Right, we're just at launch. So you know, right now I think there are about like 40 games or 30 plus games and uh, you know, that's a lot of games at Launch, but a lot of the games when you look down the list [00:06:00] are games that you can also get on the Quest too, or in Steam vr. Other platforms, their ports probably not surprising because VR has been like this for a while. A lot of classic games that keep being poured over, still playable, but you kind of wait for the new stuff. There aren't that many exclusives on here. And that's the thing that's surprising to me. I got a handful right now. There's Horizon called the Mountain, which is their kind of like immersive horizon world game that we talked about. There are some updates to games like Grand Chomo seven, the Resident Evil Village, but not as many as I would've [00:06:30] expected. Speaker 2: And I think they need more because the capabilities of this graphically with the PlayStation five are very intense. Plus there's, there's a technology called Foviated Rendering where it's using eye tracking to only look at where you're looking at and maximize. The point is they could drive more graphics out of that and make it look higher res, that type of technology, you know, you can't just update ports from a Quest two and give them a remaster, which is what's happening now. I think you can go a lot further, but they've gotta kind of lead the way for that and not [00:07:00] everyone's gonna do that. You probably need Sony to drive that Sony, that's a long answer to say it's games, but it's a limited set. And we didn't get into one thing that this gets into work apps. Speaker 1: Yes. So I did a whole video on mixed reality where you can work on your computer inside the headset and swap around screens and kind of have like an entire workflow. The quest too unlocks mixed reality when it comes to working or even applications. The PSVR two does not have any mixed reality. Speaker 2: No, and [00:07:30] and it could, it could very well have mixed reality and I expect that it probably will in the same way that it's using, it's black and white pass through cameras and layer things in the real world. It does mixed reality when you set up your room. It certainly could do that. But you're right, there are all these other ways of using VR that this does. It could be 3D art and sculpting, it could be metaverse social things, all the fitness apps on here, which it's a big landscape. There are a lot of different ways you could use VR right now. This is not tapping into that. I think those could happen. But I, the question is, is that even really what this is about? Mm-hmm [00:08:00] <affirmative> and I think if you're curious about everything, the future of the immersive landscape could be all those fringe benefit things. You, you probably wanna go with something like this. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the nice thing about the Game catalog with the Quest too is that there's an entire library of a lot of Speaker 2: Free Speaker 1: Games available that are social apps and you can interact with your friends currently it feels like the PSVR two is not about connecting with your friends yet. Speaker 2: No, currently no. This, it probably will be, but we don't know when. Speaker 1: But with the Quest two, there are so many [00:08:30] games that I'm already playing, whether it's golfing population one, which is like a first person shooter, rec room, different social apps, they are all on here and I'm connecting with friends and even making like online friends that I play with. So I feel like if you are a co-op gamer, this may be the device for you as it stands right now. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a much more established platform. And the question of how many people come aboard here, how many things are gonna be cross compatible? Some games are coming out that are also multiplayer are coming out here, but will they feel as cross-platform? [00:09:00] You know, we're, we're like kind of on day one of Speaker 1: This. So one thing that surprised me about the PSVR two was how you can play PS five games on it. Tell me about that experience. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I mean really this just turns into a way you could wear a display on your head and play games. The nice thing is that you don't even need a TV once it's set up. So you could potentially just have this plugged into a PS five and and play your games. It, even though it has a higher res display on paper, what it does is it turns into an effectively a 10 80 p cinema display that you play games on. [00:09:30] And it looks good, you can watch movies on it, but uh, when I, when I played films on it, it's not the same as a really nice tv. It's, it's fine. And I think all VR headsets have this challenge and we haven't quite reached the ultimate VR cinema display experience yet. But I would say it's fine. It would not be the ideal way I'd watch something. Speaker 1: One thing that stood out to me with this feature was the fact that you can resize this screen to have like a huge screen in front of you, which looked awesome. And what was surprising to me is that when you're playing this, [00:10:00] watching the screen in your headset, it doesn't project to the tv. I'm not sure, maybe it can't process them at the same time, who knows. And then the other thing was you can't use the VR controllers with most of the games because they're not built like a PS five controller, Speaker 2: Right? It's missing the D pad, it's missing that touch pad that's clickable. So it has a lot of the buttons but not all of the buttons. So you're right, like you have to go grab your, your dual sense controller just fine. It's just that, you know, there's one little thing that this can't be your every controller. You will have to go [00:10:30] swap back and pick up the Speaker 1: Other one. Yeah, and on that note, something that would be helpful, PlayStation is the ability for you to find that controller wearing the headset like, you know, have it be outlined somewhere because currently you can't do that cuz I've lost Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I fumbled around and been like, where the heck is that Controllers like point and arrow. Speaker 1: Let's talk about price. How much is the psvr too? Speaker 2: So it's $550 for the headset, but that's not the only thing you need. You need the PlayStation five, which brings it up to a [00:11:00] thousand dollars basically. And there's no bundle. There's no bundle for the PS five and the PSVR two together, which is unfortunate, but you know, it's also only February. Maybe they'll do that by the end of the year. I'm hoping that'll happen. Uh, there's one bundle that includes Horizon called the Mountain, but basically it's just including the games no real like effective discount, you know, whereas this $400, which is expensive, still more expensive than it was the year before last, but it's still the most affordable VR headset that's all in one. [00:11:30] I think Meta knows that. I think that's what it's riding on to say how do you beat that? You kind of can't, although you probably wanna wait for the next one. This is a much more enticing proposition for all the stuff that can do, even if it has a more limited processor. Plus it can connect to your pc, you can still use it as a tethered headset for PC gaming if you have a pc. So there's a lot of benefits here. This is a PlayStation five only VR headset. That's what you use it for. It's not gonna work on its own. It's not gonna work with any other device that [00:12:00] you might Speaker 1: Have. And often with the Quest two meta does package in a couple games with it. So you're getting that added value to the headset as well. Speaker 2: That's right. There's also that and especially as it's been around for a while, they keep putting in bundles and deals. That being said, you probably wanna wait on this because by the end of the year we're expecting another. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's possible that we will be getting the meta quests three in the fall. And there's a lot of what the Quest Pro one of Meta's newer headsets [00:12:30] could say about what we'll see in the new headset. What are some of the features that you think we'll see in a Quest three? Speaker 2: The Quest Pro has a higher resolution display, higher even than the PlayStation VR two, it's got mixed reality using a color pass through camera and it's also got eye tracking plus face tracking. Now a lot of those features I would expect to come to the Quest three, maybe not all of them, maybe not the eye and face tracking, but I would expect the color pass through mixed reality to be part of the picture. Higher resolution, uh, probably some sort of a new chip. And [00:13:00] that's enough stuff that you probably wanna see what that's going to be. And that's not even counting in all the other things that might come throughout the year. Other players in the landscape. And we're expecting something probably from Apple. Uh, the, the story about Apple keeps growing, that they're gonna have this headset now we don't know when that's gonna launch. We don't know how much that's gonna cost. It sounds extremely high and whether even you'd want the first gen one and whether it works at the devices you have. So in a sense you kind of wanna wait for that, but it's another one to keep an eye on. Yeah, Speaker 1: And I, I do think it's also [00:13:30] safe to say that that Apple headset that could be coming is a different caliber than where these are that is supposedly going to be priced around $3,000 with more of a push on mixed reality augmented reality. Whereas these are definitely VR first products while the Quest two does have that mixed reality as well. If you do wanna see a vision into what mixed reality looks like on the Quest two, make sure you watch my video where I worked with the Quest Pro and you've gotta check out Scott's review of the [00:14:00] Psbr R two to learn more about this one. We have a lot more coming out on VR and mixed reality. You gotta keep it here on CNN by subscribing. Give this video alike if you enjoyed it. I'm Justin, this is Scott and we'll see you in the Metaverse.