PlayStation VR review: When good enough is great

sony's playstation vr sales have been stronger than expected

this was supposed to be the year virtual reality broke out. the oculus rift and htc vive, the first two high-end consumer devices on the market, arrived this spring to critical praise and preorders that sold out within minutes. then… they plateaued. despite some great experiences, months of near-total unavailability dulled the post-release buzz for both headsets, particularly the rift. neither the rift or the vive ecosystems produced a killer app that was big enough to push vr out of the margins, especially given the high cost of a headset and gaming pc. while 360-degree video has at least gotten a toehold in popular culture, the dream of sophisticated vr gaming — which arguably resurrected virtual reality in the first place — remains far away for most people.

playstation vr is sony’s attempt at bringing virtual reality to its playstation 4 console, starting next week. arriving right in time for the holidays, it’s being positioned as a (relatively) cheap, unintimidating gaming headset, designed for a device that might already be sitting in your living room. the rift and vive had to be judged on a sort of abstract scale of quality — on whether they were good ambassadors for the medium of vr, and good harbingers of things to come. the question for playstation vr is simpler: if you’re one of the millions of people who own a playstation 4, should you get one?

how does playstation vr work?

like other virtual reality headsets on the market, playstation vr has the arduous task of completely immersing you in a video game by producing two images simultaneously and then sending them to a headset a few feet away. but unlike the competition who require expensive graphics cards to get the job done, ps vr can do it using only the playstation 4's built-in gpu.

it achieves this by using the playstation camera to track nine different points of light on the headset and the lights on either the move controllers or on the dualshock 4, depending on which game you're playing.

it's surprisingly accurate given the fact that it's only using a single camera to track what's happening ... but it's not foolproof by any stretch of the imagination. we'll cover performance in detail in a minute, but be prepared for the camera to lose track of the controllers. a lot.

but the real bummer here is that because sony only uses one camera instead of two, it's harder for playstation vr to track you if you get up and walk around than it is for a system like the htc vive which can offer true room-scale vr. that said, it still can support you if you decide to get up and wander around, but don't expect to take more than a few steps in any direction without a warning from the system that you're straying too far away.

to that end, most playstation vr games can recommend that you stay in one of two positions, either sitting down or standing up and stationary. if you're prone to motion sickness, sitting down might be a bit more comfortable, however, certain games are definitely better played on your feet.

depending on where and how you angle your camera, switching between the two might not be so easy, so it's best to find an angle that covers the majority of the room in case you want to switch from one to the other without having to get up, move the camera and recalibrate.

but let's back up. up until now, i've thrown the words "vr" and "virtual reality" around a lot and haven't provided much explanation for them.

vr has existed in one form or another for decades, but the modern version of the technology is more immersive and less nausea-inducing than it's ever been. in more or less words, virtual reality is just that – a virtual world that gives you the experience of being somewhere else in a different time, at a different place, sometimes as far as an alien world, all without ever leaving your home.

and yes, it's just as cool as it sounds.

if you want to be specific about it, playstation vr can handle 1080p games on its 920 x rgb x 1080 oled display at either 90hz (meaning that the image refreshes itself 90 times per second) or at 120hz depending on the vr game or application.

and for those concerned about latency, sony says that playstation vr's response rate is locked in at around 18ms – which is about 0.002 seconds faster than the highest acceptable latency before you would notice the lag in vr.

those numbers are great, but they're matched by both the htc vive and oculus rift. the one advantage sony has that neither oculus nor htc can claim is that it's actually a world-class game publisher. while the other two have been trying to create connections with developers over the past few years, sony already has them.

to that end, sony is promising 50 new titles on the platform before the end of the year, some of which will be made by sony's extremely competent first-party studios. (the first of them, playstation vr worlds, is absolutely incredible – you'll go from being put in a shark cage to holding up a bank and end by careening downhill on your back, dodging cars while going faster than the bobsled team in cool runnings.)

playstation vr on ps4 pro

while writing the ps4 pro review, we got the chance to try the upgraded hardware with the playstation vr and the results were noticeable, if a bit underwhelming.

there's also another piece of hardware to consider when looking at buying a playstation vr, and that's sony's brand-new, ultra-powered ps4 pro. 

with additional processing power, the ps4 pro is capable of creating an even more immersive virtual reality experience for the games that support it – there's around 30-or-so titles at the moment, with about 15 more coming before the end of the year. 

the improvement ps4 pro promises can take many forms – from more detailed textures to better draw distances, and even a small reduction in graininess. the advantages differ from game-to-game, and ps4 pro is currently setup to only support games where the developer has enabled "pro mode", a hardware boosting technology that tells the ps4 to use extra processing power.

there's definitely a distinct difference between ps4 and ps4 pro versions of vr games, however, it's probably not one that can be spotted by the unwitting non-techie – it's something that you can only spot if you're paying close attention to how certain textures look in-game or how objects look in the distance. lag felt less prevalent on the pro system though, in all fairness, it wasn't something we felt was a major problem while using the standard issue console. 

whether the minor improvements are worth paying extra for the more powerful hardware is ultimately a decision we'll leave up to you, however it's our opinion that you can get by with a standard ps4 just fine.