The new PS VR2 virtual reality headset in action.
Each night this week I’ve been escaping boring old reality with its pain and suffering, bad news, terrible events and stinking humidity to instead explore strange alien planets, tear around the world’s most famous racecourses at reckless speed and shotgun-blast zombies in their stupid, decaying, undead heads.
So far, so videogame, right? Wrong.
PlayStation’s new Virtual Reality headset, the PS VR2, has been nothing less than a wondrously therapeutic escape hatch from the many woes of this world. Unlike “pancake gaming” - the unflattering, but delicious sounding, term given to playing on your flatscreen TV or monitor - VR gaming truly puts you inside its games worlds. It can be considered a technological portal from this world into many others.
Unless you’ve strapped a headset on and experienced VR for yourself, it’s hard to grasp how mindblowing it actually is. How game-changing it is. How revolutionary it is. It’s like going from silent to talkies, black and white to colour or CDs to iPods. It’s easy to see why Facebook’s nerd king got so excited about VRs potential and started pouring US$10 billion a year - a year! - into its widely mocked and derided VR Metaverse.
It takes a special kind of genius to turn something amazing into a giant, embarrassing fail (see also a recent billionaire man-child’s disastrous and juvenile takeover of Twitter) but what the Metaverse got woefully wrong, and that PS VR2 gets incredibly right, is that virtual reality should not be used to recreate the most boring and mundane parts of our world. You do not sell VR by showing a trip to a virtual supermarket to pay real money for virtual groceries or people holding a work meeting in a virtual boardroom.
There is no PowerPoint VR available for PS VR2. Instead, there are tremendously sized robot dinosaurs stomping after you through a rainforest-like jungle, Star Wars characters taking you on a little adventure and a kayak for you to paddle furiously in a race around antarctic waters. This is what VR is all about. Escaping this world. Not taking it with you.
This is Sony’s second stab at VR on their PlayStation console and it’s a huge step forward over their previous effort. This is apparent as soon as you set it up, which only requires plugging in a very long cord into the front of your console. No more putzing about with breakout boxes and cameras and endless tangles of cords. It’s simple and it works and is the first sign that PS VR2 is ready for primetime.
The second is the way the thing looks. It’s as futuristic as design comes - especially the included sense controllers, which are shaped like hollowed-out orbs and are jam-packed with tech which is engineered to seamlessly disappear when you start playing.
The headset is also lighter and better in every way. It’s covered in cameras that track your movements, including that of your eyes, and has two 4K OLED displays packed inside resulting in crystal clear and realistic images. And with the raw grunt of the PS5 behind it, there’s no shortage of power on hand to keep things running smoothly.
It’s the simplest and cheapest way to get into top-of-the-line VR gaming. To get comparable performance elsewhere you’d need a high-spec PC and headset and even then the experience wouldn’t be as plug-and-play as PlayStation’s offering. Of course, the word “cheapest” there is relative. It’s a pricey investment. PS VR2 will set you back more than the PS5 required to run it.
While the launch line-up mostly consists of ports of PC VR titles like the adventure game Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, frenetic on-rails horror shooter Zombieland: Headshot Fever Reloaded and space explorer No Man’s Sky VR, it also boasts a couple of attractive exclusives. Firstly, there’s the visual wow of Horizon Call of the Mountain, a VR spin-off from Sony’s popular action-adventure Horizon Zero Dawn franchise, which has you scaling vertiginous rocky cliff faces and squaring off against robo-dinos with a bow and arrow.
Then there’s the big hitter. Gran Turismo 7 VR. The most immersive and realistic racing experience short of taking a car out to the Waikato’s Hampton Downs race track. Only in VR, there’s no risk of personal or financial injury if you crash while zooming around the Daytona Speedway or the famous Nürburgring. Gran Turismo was already an addictively fun game and by genuinely putting you inside its roster of desirably expensive cars in VR it transcends to the next level. It’s one of the very best VR experiences you can have.
There’s only a few downsides. First, the VR experience feels so real that it tricks your brain and this can cause VR sickness, a similar feeling to motion sickness, in some people. But this passes as you get your “VR legs”. I’m no VR vet and I’ve rarely experienced this on the PS VR2, but it is worth noting. The second is the price. Its high-end tech comes with a high-end price.
And the third is that while it’s successfully transported me out of the humdrum world this week to astonish, inspire and the good kind of terrify, it’s been unable to do a thing about the humidity.