SAN MATEO, Calif. — On Sept. 7, I was invited by Sony to try a hands on demonstration of its new virtual reality headset, the PlayStation VR2. I can recall using the headset’s spatial tracking to peek through a door, or around a corner. I have fond memories of attempting to reload a sawed-off shotgun, failing, reaching for a knife on my belt and stabbing a zombie in the side of the head. The vertigo-inducing feeling of climbing a rock face and looking down to find yourself hanging over a ravine needs to be seen to be believed.
I tried the new PlayStation VR2. It’s immersive, and a joy to wear.
But I don’t remember what the PS VR2 felt like to wear — perhaps the best compliment you can pay a VR headset.
The headset is sleek and lightweight, with comfortable padding around the face that easily accommodated my glasses. The PS VR2 also boasts a 4K HDR resolution with a 110-degree field of view. As a VR novice, the exact specs don’t tell me much. The most important question is: Are the games cool in VR? Let me put it plainly: The feel of the headset absolutely contributes to the in-game experience, making play in the worlds on offer more immersive than I anticipated going into the demonstrations.
Setup and starting to play was remarkably easy. In the settings menu, I was prompted to scan my surroundings so that the headset knew of obstacles or furniture around me. Once my “play space” was scanned, I could edit it manually, expanding it or carving it down with the controllers. But on several occasions I would run into the limits of the play space — which flashes red when your controller moves out of bounds — briefly reminding me that I’d lost awareness of my place in the real space around me, and instilling a mild panic. On more than one occasion, I would confidently try to guess where the TV was in the room; I was never correct.
After my first few sessions, it was also a tad disorienting taking off the device and getting reacquainted with normal depth perception, but not to the degree where it disrupted my enjoyment of the demos. Beyond that feeling, and some minor adjustment of the straps and lenses here and there, once the headset was on, I largely forgot I was wearing one.
The headset also includes cameras on the inside, for eye tracking, which developers said they could use to optimize renders based on where a player is looking.
“As you move your eye across the screen, we know what to render at the highest fidelity possible, to the point where we’re able to raise the bar on what a VR game can look like,” said Felix Riga van den Bergh, project art director at Sony-owned Guerrilla Games. “We can just simply put more polygons and more pixels on the screen.”
Per Sony, the PS VR2′s OLED display can a display resolution of 2000×2040 per eye and smooth frame rates of 90 to 120 Hz. Beyond that however, technical specs of the hardware were not detailed.
While at PlayStation headquarters, I had the opportunity to try four demos, representing slightly altered slices of the following VR titles: “Resident Evil Village PS VR2,” “Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge – Enhanced Edition,” “The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution” and “Horizon Call of the Mountain.” All four were highly engrossing — if in wildly different ways.
“Resident Evil” was my first demo, in which I got acquainted to the new tech. Here, I felt the degree to which cinematics would be impacted by VR’s altered perspective. It is one thing to be taunted and haunted by the giant Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters on a TV screen; it is another entirely to feel yourself be lifted in the air by her from a first-person viewpoint.
In “Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge,” I witnessed how VR might broaden the number of verbs packed into a game. Beyond just running, jumping and shooting, I spent the bulk of my time in “Galaxy’s Edge” throwing repulsor darts, reaching for and eating space tacos, pestering a bartender and playing a synthesizer/drum instrument tucked away at the back of a cantina. These sort-of-mini-games didn’t feel auxiliary to my enjoyment of the demo; they were a big part of it.
Playing “The Walking Dead,” I was astonished by the ways in which features that would have been relegated to button presses in a standard release were full-blown mechanics in virtual reality. Reloading, in particular, required an adjustment period on my part: picking up and using a chainsaw, for example, required a different set of hand motions than doing the same for a sawed off shotgun — a tweak to the traditional video game formula that dramatically increased the tension in a way befitting a good zombie survival game.
The controllers are a work of art themselves, featuring adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. Though hardly revolutionary, I particularly enjoyed the finger tracking feature (already available on the Meta Quest 2, along with several other of the features described above). Without registering any button presses, the Sony controllers detected the presence of fingers touching certain parts of the controller. Though largely cosmetic (as far as I could tell from the demos made available) the feature allowed me to make funny shapes with my in-game avatar’s hands, including the L symbol, finger guns, thumbs up and loose approximations of some cruder gestures.
“Horizon” was the culmination of the experience. First, the game takes players through a roller coaster-like experience, where your mobility is limited as you move on rails through Horizon’s world, just barely scraping under a Tallneck dinosaur, and watching as other dangerous beasts skitter all around you. As an on-ramp for people who may not be VR-savvy but want to experience some of what the technology has to offer, the introduction is impeccable.
The game also casts players as a new character — a disgraced former soldier who is an expert climber — and the portion of the demo that focused on climbing was a revelation. Climbing felt intuitive (and strangely enough, almost like an exercise) and the vistas that became visible on the climbs made the case for VR in and of themselves.
Crucially, though, “Horizon” — and many of the other VR experiences — were funny. In “Horizon,” I played around with drums, maracas and finger paint for longer than I was in combat. At a certain point, I started to pick up every loose object just to throw it. Far from diminishing the experience, though, these details (the result of hours of development work) expand what you can do in VR games in a way that heightens the medium overall. Small details, and the ability to find fun and beauty in unexpected features and places, can only be a boon to VR in the long run.
“With a lot of these small details, as soon as the details are missing, you notice it instantly,” said Guerrilla’s Riga van den Bergh. “A lot of detail goes into making it something that you almost don’t notice or think about. If all the right elements are there, it just feels immersive and normal.”
Source: WP
