I'm at the Sony booth at CES and we are checking out their new psvr 2 headset
and holy cow is it a big upgrade over the
last gen version of this the original version of it launched I believe in 2017
almost six years ago now at this point and has received very little in the way
of updates outside of just game support and don't get me wrong there's a lot of
great games for psvr but in a lot of ways their old headset is lacking and
they've really address a lot of things the big one is that it's entirely
switched to Inside Out tracking before you had to use the PlayStation camera
along with the sex toy shaped move controllers that were like worse they
were worse than wiimotes basically at the end of the day and tracking was very
very limited you had the lights on the end of the move controllers that would
prevent you from being able to turn around or even really move in a very
wide area this is going to allow you just to have a much larger play Space
like look at the size of this booth it's not all of her show because it's inside
out you have way more freedom of movement for truly free VR except you
still have a cable but it's just the one cable that connects you to your
Playstation 5. a lot of the big upgrades come in the form of the display play it
still uses an OLED for great blacks and great color but we have an improved
field of view going from 100 on the old one to 110 on the new one a massive bump
and resolution going from a Pity will 960 by 1080 to a 2000 by 2040 resolution
for each eye huge increase and it looks really great also a massive bump in
refresh rate this is now going to give you 120 hertz for your refresh rate
which is going to help with smoothness and response time the original psvr's
response time was about 16 milliseconds which is about at the cusp that you can
do for comfortable VR any slower and people start getting sick this has
reduced it to around 8 milliseconds a far more pleasurable experience on the
headset you have two places to adjust it on the back there's a button in the
middle that allows you to pull to adjust the headband then a dial to dial it in
exactly how you want it and you have a button here that allows you to move it a
bit further forward or back which makes it more accommodating for different types of faces one thing that was kind
of weird is this uh like accordion rubber gasket uh I found it comfortable
enough but it's not as nice to say a fabric or a foam but it does have the
benefit of being a little bit easier to clean and you won't have to buy replacement as frequently like you
eventually will have to do with a foam gasket on the front here
we have our ipd adjustment and on the
bottom you have a microphone the power button and a button to activate
pass-through something that we saw on the HTC Vive XR Elite was an RGB pass
through camera that made it really really convenient to take a break from
your game and pick up your phone without having to take the headset off this is
still using just these cameras and it's not quite as good an experience if you
need to like reply to a text or something you will have to take the headset off but what you really want to
talk about is gaming you're on the PlayStation 5 after all now you might be
thinking wait if we're running at nearly 4K and we're running at 120 frames per
second how is that gonna work well this takes advantage of phobiated rendering
so using eye tracking in the device it'll only render the maximum resolution
of the pixels that your eye is actually looking at and everything else can be
reduced in resolution as it enters your periphery this will allow for far better
looking games that are far easier to run and it has a profound effect on the
smoothness of games also new is the controllers as I said before the old
controllers were pretty outdated feeling more like wiimotes than anything else in
VR the new sense controllers these ones don't have weird balls on the front of
them they're using the infrared tracking from the headset for everything now it's
also a more conventional controller layout now that we've kind of found one that I think most people agree on is
good for VR you have a thumbstick on each controller they have two face
buttons obviously your start menu and stuff like that triggers and these are
using the same adaptive triggers that you can find on the Dual sense
controller which means that if you want to have a resistive action like say
you're pulling a bow back it'll actually resist the pull you also have a grip
button on each side and it has finger tracking for up to three fingers so each
of these buttons also has touch sensitivity so when you just lay your fingers on them you will have like a
closed Fist and you'll be able to do like stuff like make a peace sign or
maybe something a little bit less kind than a peace sign and all of these
features bring this up to date with a lot of the competing standards which is
great because the controllers on the original psvr sucked we also reap the
benefits of Sony's a continued Quest into enhanced haptics so you just get
the same kind of haptic feedback here as well as you get haptic feedback on the
back of the headset so if you get conked on the back of the head you'll know
we're about to play a game with Horizon VR call of the mountain but first you're
going to listen to something from dbrand okay so our sponsor dropped out for CES
2023 but dbrand foot of the bill they're making me come out here on the streets
and offer people Tech tips for free and
I hate it you want a tech tip tip yeah
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about who made me do this go to shortlineus.com so hold those in and
move your arms at your side yeah grab an arrow you're gonna reach over
your back and you're gonna pull put it in talk shoot okay you're totally gonna
go here I'll toss the headphones on you as well oh sweet
um foreign
I'm not so good at it is difficult yeah
especially the first couple of tries yeah oh sweet thank you so I just
finished playing it and we've just had to move over here we ran out of time in the booth and not gonna lie it was
pretty fun there were some issues with tracking the
stuff that they can probably fix with some software in the future I found that
the range of where I could move my hands was a little bit lacking the moment you
get kind of behind the 90 degree Mark of your head it totally loses track of
where your arms are having cameras positioned further back would have
benefited that a lot and I don't know how much of a difference they can really
make that's one of the benefits you have with base stations that you'll just never really get
with Inside Out tracking um the headset itself was comfortable
very easy to adjust surprisingly usable
but I also noticed some issues with the screen while the phobiated rendering
worked really well it was weird there's this crazy demo where you like look at
individual dots it tracks where your eyes move and that's how you calibrate
it and then you could control the menus just by looking at the exactly where you
wanted to go and selecting it just by like blinking your eyes it was very very
well done but I noticed at the edge of my view there was significant chromatic
aberration which indicates a lens issue we don't know if that's just this unit
or if that's gonna affect the whole lineup but your mileage may vary I find
I'm very sensitive to stuff like that some people aren't and if it is a
problem they won't have time to fix it because good news it comes out February
22nd this year that's just a little over a month away on and it's gonna be
launching for 5.50 or as they say 549
which makes it a pretty solid value against competitors the quest is 400 but
this is going to be a bit more powerful much higher specs and you can feel a
little bit more confident that it's gonna be backed up with awesome games that are going to be developed from Sony
Verizon call of the mountain which played here was pretty fun they're releasing Resident Evil Village in VR
for it which if it's as good as Resident Evil 7 was on VR will be a very fun time
one thing that's a downside is that they don't actually know if there's gonna be
a backwards compatibility with the original psvr Library so some games that
you may have loved like maybe the dark like the Iron Man VR stuff like that
might actually not function on the new hardware we know that Gran Turismo has received
an update that's going to allow it to work with the new hardware and you'll probably see a lot of the first party
Sony games doing that but for now it means up in the air one more thing that
I forgot to mention you get two of the sense controllers the headset itself and
a set of earbuds that are going to be able to take advantage of the Tempest audio which is Sony's spatial audio
implementation they also can integrate into the headset
you have a little hole in a channel where you can put the wire through it's a lot nicer we weren't able to use them
here because of Sanitation issues but it seems like a promising value for what
you're getting in the Box bye bye thanks for watching short
circuit if you like this video go watch our other CES stuff mwah