PSVR 2 Reportedly “jailbroken” for PC, Hackers Claim Eye-tracking and Haptics Unlock

By
Scott Hayden
-
22

A hardware hacker group previously behind the PSVR2Toolkit says it’s effectively “jailbroken” PSVR 2 for PC.

When Sony released its PC adapter for PSVR 2 in 2024, it released the headset from PS5 exclusivity, allowing users to play SteamVR games on VR-ready PCs for the first time.

Still, Sony didn’t release enable every hardware capability, with tethered PC gameplay notably lacking features such as eye-tracking, HDR, and headset rumble.

Now, the hardware hacker group previously associated with the PSVR2Toolkit—an open source driver toolkit interfacing with Sony’s PSVR 2 PC support—claims to have “jailbroken” the PSVR 2.

IPSVR 2 PC Adapter | mage courtesy Sony

“[W]e can enable HMD vibration and eye tracking camera feed on PC,” says group member ‘tinybnuuy’, who also credits fellow programmers ‘supremium’, ‘tomoeko’, and ‘ShinyQuagsire’.

“[T]his has been 5 months in the making, we hope to release this soon so that everyone can play with it,” tinybnuuy says.

Sony’s official PC support for PSVR 2 (via SteamVR) disables key features like eye-tracking, HDR, and haptics. Early efforts however managed to pull eye-tracking data in some respect, but it was notably uncalibrated and not broadly usable.

SEE ALSO
Netflix Acquires XR Avatar Startup Ready Player Me

By mid-2025, tools like PSVR2Toolkit enabled eye-tracking and controller haptics through a modified driver layer, although it still didn’t feature proper OpenXR integration (i.e., no universal foveated rendering), as mentioned previously by UploadVR.

Provided the team’s work truly is a ‘jailbreak’, we would expect to see full access to cameras, headset haptics, and possibly even an HDR pipeline sometime in the near future.

That is, provided Sony doesn’t see the jailbreak as a threat, as the company appears to have intentionally disabled those features on PC, effectively keeping them exclusive to PS5.

This article may contain affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product we may receive a small commission which helps support the publication. See here for more information.

Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Oxi

    Why should we have to do this? Were they scared we would pirate these features if they didn't lock this down?

    • Peter vasseur

      Now they didn’t to try and get you to by a ps5.

    • XRC

      The eye tracking uses the Tobii eye chip and corresponding Tobii gaming licence installed on client machine (PS5).

      There wouldn't have been a licensing agreement to cover use on PC (not the PSVR2 target platform), as that Tobii gaming licence would be specific to Playstation under the terms and conditions originally agreed with Tobii

      • Rogue Transfer

        Actually, the eye-processing chip is inside the headset, not the PS5. That's how the above toolkit driver gains access to eye-tracking data.

        The headset does all the eye-camera processing and just sends out the eye rotations/poses through the USB cable to the PS5 or PC.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          But a driver provided by Sony would need a license to cover usage on PC, same goes for HDR (as you saw in europe where Disney+ had to disable it because they didn't have the proper licenses).

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          There is a difference between detecting the current pupil position, which is mostly about finding a dark circle on a white background, which can be done on a cheap microcontroller, and properly predicting based on current eye movement where the user will lock during the next frame, which is required for use in foveated rendering with high precision and low latency. The latter part is rather compute intensive and what Tobii specialized in, asking for licenses for their software running on either PC or PSVR2.

          What was now achieved is getting the current gaze position from the SoC in PSVR2 that takes the feeds from the room and eye tracking cameras and performs some basic image analysis, reporting the results back to the PSVR2. What wasn't "jailbroken" was the Tobii software running on PS5, because AFAIK it was never part of Sony's PC drivers.

          So you can now feed the current gaze, determined by the PSVR2 SoC and extracted by the jailbreak, into another software for doing the proper future gaze prediction. But these aren't freely available in a similar quality to what Tobii offers (for a fee), so this doesn't provide the full PSVR2 ETFR features to PC users. The best chance to properly use this new option for more than avatar gaze will most likely be Valve implementing their own ETFR solution for Frame that will also be usable with other PCVR HMDs offering eye tracking.

          I haven't looked into the exact details of the jailbreak, so in theory the PSVR2 SoC could actually provide not only current, but also predicted gaze. But that is very unlikely, given that the SoC in PSVR2 is a lot smaller/slower than the XR2+ Gen 1 in Quest Pro, which offered only about 1.25x the framerate compared to non-foveated rendering due to prediction causing high CPU load. In contrast some Unity devs reported up to 4x the base framerate with ETFR on PSVR2, very likely due to the much faster CPU handling the prediction, allowing for more precision and therefore a much smaller foveated area that had to be rendered at full resolution.

          • Night

            Even limited in that way it could be potentially useful in sims with a more steady gaze

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            There are a lot of uses for even very slow eye tracking. For example humans look at the target while aiming, so games can properly adjust where an object the user throws in VR is supposed to go. Or highlight options for objects the user is looking at without first having to pick them up. And of course AVP has shown that a UI driven by a mix of eye tracking and gestures can be way more intuitive and easy to use than any laserpointer-to-the-wall UI. And none of these require any time critical eye movement prediction.

            But just like avatar-gaze in VRChat, these all require active implementation by the developers, which so far rarely happened because so few HMDs featured eye tracking. Meta not adding it to Quest 3 has no doubt thrown back widespread eye tracking support by at least four years, and that's assuming that Quest 4 will finally include it.

            I don't know if there are even any PSVR2 games making direct use of eye tracking, even though it is always available there. Cross-platform titles wouldn't use it, because mechanics relying on it would work nowhere else, and there aren't that many PSVR2-only titles. So until eye tracking becomes more widespread, the primary use case for it will be ETFR simply because it can provide a performance benefit without requiring any significant or incompatible changes. You basically just have to check a box, which is checked by default on Quest.

            Given that the main eye tracking hardware is basically just a few IR LEDs and cheap lowres IR tracking cameras, it's a shame that eye tracking for at least some "slow" use cases hasn't been standard on all HMDs for years. Mobile SoCs before XR2 Gen 2 were still limited by the number of available camera ports, requiring some hacks on Quest Pro to add both eye and face tracking, but everything since 2023/Quest 3/XR2 Gen 2 had plenty of ports and could add eye tracking at minimal cost and effort.

          • timo weber

            Pls see my comment at the latest NVIDIA news

        • XRC

          As already mentioned it uses the Tobii eye chip (and Tobii software on client machine)

          I have several headsets with Tobii eye tracking so very familiar with their technology;)

      • Oxi

        That makes sense for the eye tracking I guess but does that mandate them to lock you out of it or just to not have an official driver? What were the barriers in place for that, and doesn’t Tobii then have an inventive to sell you a driver? Also couldn’t they have added the license to the adapter?

  • jdogg

    now it just needs a decent optical stack and fix the horrible image smearing and it might actually be a decent hmd

    • Rogue Transfer

      That was a side-effect of HDR being enabled on PS5. On PC, HDR wasn't available, while that is a loss, the benefit is no image smearing.

  • unknown_7492

    why the fuck are you posting this to the internet right now?
    you’ve made it more likely that sony will patch the exploit sooner because you posted this on the internet!!

    • geronimo

      I think the exploit is already patched out, technically. The hack requires you to downgrade the headset to v06.00

  • Cool stuff

  • francisco garay

    Why doesn't Sony unlock it itself?

    It's not that great of a VR system when compared to the PSVR1. I just bought a PS5 pro and I feel so let down by Sony in general. This was their offering for the next gen, only a handful of games use the system to it's fullest and out of that handful of games only 1 or 2 are actually any fun.

    What they did with the PSVR2 is even sadder. They dropped support and dropped the best franchises we were waiting for, and worse, they made the PSVR2 with cheaper materials.

    It is less comfortable, it is like they just gave up. Sony needs to unlock it.

    • fragslayer

      Yeah, I feel bad you for ya. I've stopped saying it because people never listen anyways because somehow PlayStation is some holy relic. I grabbed the PSVR 2 at launch. I had not read much about it I figured it would be a highly upgraded version of the first with less cords.

      Kids were excited got it back and then quickly realized that the 1000s of dollars worth of content and accessories were not compatible. Quest, Valve ect can make their games backwards compatible so could have Sony. Luckily I returned mine immediately then watched as they dropped support. Just like everything they give up immediately on, consumer be damned.

      Not to mention I'm tired of every generation we get the main games at launch that look like last generation games on brand new hardware. Yet people cheer these fools along. God Of War and Horizon looked exactly like the PS4 games. Minus the DLC for the latter which is a insane thing to do. Anti consumer as can be Sony is.

      • NL_VR

        Perfect example of why we should move away from consoles and their closed ecosystems.

  • NL_VR

    Again, modders on their free time do things big corpos cant or dont want to do.

  • foamreality

    Few reasons to buy PCVR2 for playstation as there is such poor game selection and no VR games being developed for sony. They might aswell open up the eyetracking / haptics for PCVR users and actually sell some headsets and controllers . This is probably best OLED headset available for the price and not even a loss leader in production costs. Such a wasted opportunity by sony and for PCVR in general.

    • david vincent

      "This is probably the best OLED headset available for the price"
      Sure, provided you can tolerate the PSVR2's significant mura and have no requirement for a 72Hz mode.