The word “incredible” gets thrown around a lot, but virtual reality actually earns that praise: you literally won’t believe how well it works until you see it for yourself. The software side of things has been slow to catch up to the potential of VR headsets, but the technology itself is mindblowing because of the way it lets us interact with virtual worlds like we’re actually there – something that’d only been dreamed of until the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive came out earlier this year. It’s fantastic that Sony’s PlayStation VR headset will allow many more people to have these groundbreaking experiences by lowering the financial barrier to entry, with only a few compromises.
Though the PlayStation VR is advertised at only $399.99, that price is misleading because it’s mostly useless without the $59.99 PlayStation Camera, which is sold separately. Additionally, many of the launch games either require or make use of one or two motion-tracked PlayStation Move controllers, which must also be purchased separately for between $20 and $30 each. Bundles (like the one on which this review is based) are available with the full set for $499.99, which is still a major price advantage. The HTC Vive, which includes its two Lighthouse sensors and motion controllers, costs $799.99; the Oculus Rift is $599.99 and comes with one sensor and an Xbox One controller (and its wireless dongle), but Oculus will soon release its Touch controllers for an as-yet-unannounced price that is speculated to be in the range of $200. So, combined with the fact that it hooks up to a $299.99 PlayStation 4 instead of a gaming PC that would cost you $700 or more, the PlayStation VR is by far the cheapest option for good-quality VR with motion control.
Cheaper almost always comes with a “you get what you pay for” caveat, and the PlayStation VR is no exception. But the impact of those differences is less than I’d expected when it comes to what happens when you put the headset on. One of the most important parts of a VR headset is the screen, and having used the higher-resolution Oculus Rift and HTC Vive (which both use two screens for a combined resolution of 2160x1200), I’m impressed at the quality of the PlayStation VR’s 1920x1080 image, which is split down the middle to display a different point of view for each eye. While the resolution is noticeably lower, the “screen door effect,” caused by the faint lines that separate the pixels on a display when you view it up close, is minimal. In-game text is very readable (though it must be larger than on other headsets to be legible). There’s also little or none of the visible radial lens pattern or streaking light effects I observed on the other two headsets.
I’m impressed at the quality of the PlayStation VR’s image.
“
No matter which headset you choose you’ll see virtual worlds through what looks like SCUBA goggles. The field of view on the PlayStation VR is slightly lower than its competitors (meaning the goggles look thicker) but in the same ballpark; the differences between the three are minor enough that unless you’re directly comparing one after another you’re unlikely to notice.
One of the big questions going in was whether the PlayStation 4 had enough horsepower to run games at the 90-frames-per-second rate that VR demands in order to minimize nausea. So far it has kept up admirably, with no significant frame rate dips in any of the games I’ve tried. That’s in both high-detail games like Batman: Arkham VR or EVE Valkyrie and low-detail ones like Tumble VR or Job Simulator. Again, it will never look as good as a Rift or a Vive on a gaming PC, which are capable of producing sharper and more detailed images, but the PlayStation VR does the job adequately. And with several people in the IGN office playing games on it over the past week, none has reported any unusual problems with nausea.
The other crucial part of a VR setup like this one is the motion tracking, and here is where I felt the pinch most. Relative to the Vive and its two sensors placed in opposite corners of your play area, the PlayStation VR’s reliance on its single camera is a significant weakness. It does work reasonably well thanks to the depth-sensing capabilities of its two lenses, but its field of view is narrow enough that I frequently bumped up against its limits with the Move controllers. With the recommended six feet of distance between me and the camera, I find I have to frequently adjust the angle to cover me when switching between a standing experience like Batman: Arkham VR and a sitting one like SuperHyperCube.
Motion Tracking is where I felt the pinch most.
“
And even in the best-case scenario, it can’t cover your whole body and the floor around you, so if you see something shiny on or near the ground you can’t reach down to pick it up. All the games I’ve played thus far (such as Job Simulator, Tumble VR, and Batman) have accounted for this by simply warping items back to the playable height if you drop them, but it’s jarring to have your hand stop two feet from your target. You can tell someone they’re not supposed to do that until you’re blue in the face, but considering the whole point of VR is to fool people’s brains into thinking what they’re seeing is real, they will still make that mistake from time to time.
See more PlayStation VR launch game reviews here.
Also, that inherent limitation means that even though we’re being immersed in a 360-degree virtual world where things can happen anywhere, we’ll never be able to turn around 180 degrees and shoot a monster that pops up behind us. Any time your body is between your hands and the PlayStation Camera, it has no way of knowing where they are and completely loses the ability to track them.
(It’s difficult to directly compare the PlayStation Camera to the Rift’s single sensor because the Touch controllers aren’t available yet, but from my experience with head tracking the Rift’s field of view seems wider.)
Tracking works well the majority of the time, but when it doesn’t it’s frustrating.
“
In general, the motion tracking reliability ranges from adequate to flakey, especially on Move controllers – for no reason I could pinpoint, it would sometimes wig out and one of my in-game hands would vanish or start flying away uncontrollably. Yet the next session in the same environment would be fine. To be clear, it works well the majority of the time, but when it doesn’t it’s frustrating.
It’s great that the DualShock 4’s light is finally useful for something: if a game supports it, you can see your controller in the VR environment exactly where you’re holding it, often with instructions on which button to push hovering over it. That can serve as a clumsy stand-in for Move controllers if you don’t have them – and this is something the Rift’s included Xbox One controller can’t do due to lack of a tracking light.
But in many games, you’re required or strongly encouraged to use PlayStation Move controllers to interact with the virtual environments, which is a much more natural way of reaching out and touching things. Sony's use of the existing PlayStation Move controller that’s been around since 2010 has the benefit of there already being a bunch of them out there (though they’re likely pretty dusty) and their buttons and triggers are well suited for the tasks of representing hands that grasp objects or guns. It’s unfortunate there’s no rumble in them, though, because that’s the only tactile feedback that’s possible when trying to touch something that doesn’t exist or firing a gun that you expect to have a kick. [Correction: we're told there is rumble on the Move controllers, but in my experience it's so weak it might as well not be there.]
There’s an age-related drawback, too: these things still use USB Mini connections instead of the USB Micro found on the DualShock 4 and virtually every non-Apple mobile device made in the past five years. That means that for syncing and charging (unless you have a docking station) you’ll have to have an extra cable around – two, if you want to charge two Move controllers at once – and with the PlayStation VR plugged into your PS4 you’re down to a single available USB port as it is. It’s obnoxious that even a brand-new Move controller can’t use the same standard charging cable as the DualShock 4.
On the outside, the PlayStation VR is certainly the most futuristic-looking headset out there. Its sleek black and white design rimmed with blue glowing lights looks like something out of Tron or the set of Star Trek. Personally, I find it a bit tacky next to the understated all-black Rift (which uses invisible infrared lights for tracking), but we’re talking about a virtual reality headset here – looking like a sci-fi prop is appropriate enough.
Mobile users, swipe right to view more photos.
PlayStation VR feels comfortable to wear thanks to its weight distribution.
“
Though the PlayStation VR is heavier than the Vive or the Rift (610 grams compared to the Rift’s 380 and the Vive’s 555), it feels more comfortable to wear thanks to its weight distribution. All of it rests on the padded plastic crown around your head, with the screen dangling down from that instead of being pulled tight against your face to hold it on. As a result, it hasn’t left a ring around my eyes after wearing it for awhile like the Rift does. (As a bald guy, I’ve had a textured impression left high on my forehead. Most people don’t need to worry about that.) A button on the underside of the screen allows you to slide it closer to or farther from your eyes, which lets you adjust for comfort or peek out without taking the headset off.
I also love the near-total blackout of the outside world thanks to the split rubber flap that wraps around your nose as you put it on. It’s better than the Rift or the Vive in that respect – both of those let more light in around the nose. A sensor in between the eyes detects when you put on or take off the headset and turns it on and off accordingly, which is great for people like me who can’t stand when screens are on when no one’s looking at them. I do, however, notice my face gets sweatier with this headset because the rubber material that comes into contact with your face isn’t breathable. Like on the Vive and the Rift, that material is easily removable for when it eventually wears out and needs replacement. There’s also a microphone built into the underside of the screen.
Because the PlayStation VR has just one screen instead of one for each eye, there’s no adjustment to accommodate your individual interpupillary distance, or IPD. That said, none of us at IGN have had trouble getting a clear image.
I do find it tricky to put on the headset with one hand because you have to stretch the headband apart in order to fit it over your head. That’s something I often want to do because I’m holding a controller (or two) in the other. Having to put down your controller to put on the headset is an inconvenience because unless you have a table in the tracked area (which would be a tripping hazard) you won’t be able to see them to pick them up without moving the screen away from your eyes. It made me want to have a spotter present to hand me things.
Setting up a PlayStation VR is a hassle (more so than a Rift, less so than a Vive) and will almost certainly disrupt any tidy cable management you’ve put together in your entertainment center. In a way, the PlayStation VR takes us back to the days of the PlayStation 2 – the last time we were tethered to our consoles by wires.
The breakout box has no fewer than six wires coming out of it.
“
Lots of wires, in fact. The chunky breakout box that handles 3D audio processing and manipulates the image that goes out to the TV to look less warped than it would naturally sits at the center of the PlayStation VR, the PlayStation 4, and the TV. It has no fewer than six wires coming out of it: one HDMI and one USB to the PlayStation 4, one HDMI to the TV, and two HDMI to the PlayStation VR (one of which is a proprietary HDMI variant), and a power cable with its own small power brick. It’s a bit of a mess, and it’s made worse by the fact that the only USB ports on the PlayStation 4 (including the new slim version) are on the front of the console. So even if you try to tuck the box away in the back of your entertainment center you’ll always have that wire sticking out the front. This will also use up 50% of your console’s USB capacity, and there’s no hub or passthrough port on the breakout box.
There’s also the matter of the wire coming off of the headset itself, which has a couple of minor issues. The attached cable is just four and a half feet long, which isn’t long enough to use by itself unless the breakout box is in your lap. So you have to connect it to the included 10-foot extension cable, which has a flat two-inch-by-two-inch connector box with an HDMI and proprietary port on it. It’s strange because the cable isn’t a good breakaway point in case someone trips over the cord – it’s the exact same connector – so all this does is create something that smacks against your leg as you move around.
The included earbuds became entangled with the headset cord pretty much instantly.
“
The other bothersome trait is the placement of the headphone jack on the inline control box that contains the power and volume buttons for the headset. Using the included earbuds I found they became entangled with the headset cord pretty much instantly – a problem I don’t have with the Vive’s headphone jack on the headset or the Rift’s built-in headphones. Trying to untangle them while wearing a headset is a nightmare.
When you’re all set up and push the power button on the inline remote, the headset turns on and shows you the PS4 dashboard floating in space, with clearly legible text. If you’re using a DualShock 4 it works in exactly the same way, but navigating with a Move controller isn’t easy – the gestures are too imprecise. Fortunately, using the voice commands via the PlayStation Camera to launch games works well. Pairing and calibration is all done through quick and easy on-screen setup tools.
It’s great that the TV almost always shows what the person wearing the PlayStation VR is seeing. That makes VR a much more social experience. Since in my experience many of the best times I’ve had with VR headsets have been introducing people to it for the first time, that’s a big deal.
There’s a small annoyance in having to close out of a VR application in order to restore your TV display to its normal mode instead of having it do that automatically when the headset is turned off.
You can also use the PlayStation VR to play any PlayStation 4 game or watch video (on Netflix or, say, the IGN app) on a virtual screen that hovers in front of you. It looks similar to sitting a few feet from a very low-resolution 60-inch TV, so it’s not the ideal way to view much of anything, but it has its uses. For one thing it frees up the television, so someone else could watch TV (or play another game on another console if you have one) while you play in your own little world. You can also watch laying down, because the screen can be positioned in any direction, and this is the one function that you don’t need to be in view of the camera for. But again, the image quality doesn’t compare to an actual TV, so don’t think of it as a replacement. (Even the Rift and Vive don’t look great when it comes to that.)
