Following a report back in May detailing specs for Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 5 VR headset, a fresh report has appeared that echoes a few of these claims and asserts some new information too, including additional hardware info and the revelation that Sony is allegedly focusing on bringing both console-quality AAA games and hybrid flatscreen/VR titles to the PS5 platform.

Many of the specs listed below were subject of the reports made in both May (UploadVR) and June (Bloomberg). Road to VR wasn’t able to independently verify any of these claims, so take them with a grain of salt.

Here’s a recap of what we’ve heard so far, and then what’s presented in the new report. The next-gen PSVR is said to include:

  • 4.1MP (2,000 × 2,040) per-eye resolution OLED
  • IPD adjustment dial
  • Eye-tracking capable of foveated rendering
  • USB-C tether to PS5
  • Inside-out tracking
  • Head-mounted haptics
  • Holiday 2022 release date

A new report by YouTube channel PSVR without Parole maintains the headset is internally called ‘Next Gen VR’, or NGVR for short. This, along with the following information, was supposedly released yesterday at a virtual summit for prospective game developers.

The headset’s display is said to be an HDR-capable OLED, and offer a 110-degree FOV, which is slightly larger than the original’s 100-degree FOV. Lenses are said to be of a fresnel design, which may reduce the weight of the headset over the original PSVR’s conventional plano-convex lenses.

In addition to eye-tracking and foveated rendering, Sony is supposedly implementing something called “flexible scale rendering” (FSR) on PS5 for its next-gen headset. It sounds similar to Oculus’ fixed foveated rendering (FFR) technique, which automatically adjusts the level of eye texture foveation based on GPU utilization.

Next-gen PSVR controllers | Image courtesy Sony

The report claims the next-gen PSVR will be bundled with its still-unnamed controllers, which were publicly revealed back in March. Sony says the controllers include the same adaptive triggers as the PS5 DualSense controller, however the report adds that they will include capacitive touch sensors as well, which are placed accordingly to detect the position of the thumb, index, and middle finger.

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Sony’s closed-door conference was said to feature a call to action to move away from VR experiences, and focus more on console-quality AAA games. This includes VR-compatible hybrid games which are designed for dual use on traditional flatscreens and the VR headset, for example Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, Dreams, and No Man’s Sky.

Sony is allegedly going to make it possible to download whichever version of the game you want so users can save on bandwidth and local storage. It’s claimed that developers behind original PSVR games will be incentivized to remaster games for the new headset, however no mention was made of backwards compatibility.

– – — – –

If the report(s) can be believed, it seems Sony is courting a large audience of developers for its upcoming next-gen headset. PSVR without Parole specifies that we’ll learn more about launch plans and specs in early 2022, however at this pace we may be finding out much more in the months to come as further leaks inevitably arise. One thing is certain though: Sony previously said it won’t be launching in 2021.

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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.
  • Rudl Za Vedno

    Still 110-degree FOV in 2022? That’s VERY disappointing. Everything else looks top notch. Do you think FOV is horizontal or diagonal?

    • Blaexe

      Should be horizontal, so roughly at Index level. Personally I expected more aswell, especially for a headset releasing at the end of 2022 with at least a 5 years lifetime.

      • Rudl Za Vedno

        Let’s hope it really is horizontal. I can live with 110 horizontal FOV if price is Quest 2 competitive. That would mean 20 degrees real life increase over PSVR, which would be still meaningful upgrade. But diagonal 110 would be a total disappointment and a no buy at least for me.

        • Blaexe

          That guy in the video says slightly bigger than the Index.

      • Bob

        Have to agree with Rudl Za Vedno on this one; 110 diagonal simply isn’t good enough for a device that is rumored to launch at the tail end of 2022.Technology has to move forward even if that means a slightly larger former factor to accommodate larger lenses. If presence and immersion is the goal, then keeping binocular-like FOV for another five to six years isn’t going to cut it. Period.

        Besides, the PSVR is a home device designed to be tethered with the PS5 so the HMD size shouldn’t be of a concern to the majority of users as long as isn’t at ridiculous levels.

        • Charles

          I would like more FOV, but be careful what you wish for. Everyone kept demanding more FOV, so HTC obliged with the Vive Pro 2 – but they cheated, and ended up ruining the headset. They gave it more horizontal FOV simply by reducing stereo overlap. Poor stereo overlap ruins the experience for most people. The Vive Pro 2 dropped stereo overlap below the minimum acceptable threshold.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            A higher FoV also gets exponentially more expensive to render, and this extra render power will be somewhat wasted in your peripheral vision, where you cannot see details anyway. This can be somewhat mitigated by using fixed foveated rendering, and if Sony makes the eye tracking work, this should allow for increasing the FoV without performance costs.

            The reduced stereo overlap in the Vive Pro 2 is mostly due to lenses not working that well, which also causes the reduced sweet spot. The PSVR used aspheric lenses, while everybody else switched to Fresnel. Above a certain FoV it becomes very hard to use aspheric lenses while at the same time making the HMD usable for a wide range of user. This is a problem that also plagues the lenses of the Varjo XR-3, which work great for many and rather bad for some. Fresnel lenses make it easier to control these parameters, at the cost of god rays etc., so it seems likely that PSVR2 will switch to them. And with the amount of resources Sony has and the targeted mass audience, I hope that they will come up with better lenses than HTC.

          • MosBen

            I mostly agree, but I’d suggest a few things. First, as I understand it, “peripheral vision” isn’t a single thing that we should be quick to dismiss. While it’s true that your vision at the extreme edges, greater than 110 degrees, is mostly just light and color for detecting movement, closer in you do get more detail that’s a bit more useful. Out to around 120 degrees is still pretty decent. I’d also suggest that even if extending beyond that into areas of peripheral vision that aren’t meaningfully high resolution is still useful for immersion. You may not see much detail out there, but limiting your vision to 100 or 110 degrees feels like staring at the world through the port hole of a ship. To achieve a more complete feeling of presence we need a wider FOV, and I’d say that that would be worth it even at the expense of a lower overall resolution.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Yes, in your extreme peripheral vision you turn into the Jurassic Park T-Rex that only reacts to movement. Humans have about 180º FoV when looking straight forward with no fixed cutoff for details. If you hold hand left to your head, it vanishes from your view but you still notice it once you turn your wrist. Most color/stereo vision is concentrated in just 30º at the center of your vision and rather slow, while fast brightness changes on the edge. You will see the traffic light changing faster if you don’t look at it directly.

            The problem with VR displays is that the human eye can move in its socket, and with this movement you actually have a FoV of about 270º. So you notice a lot more of the world than what you consciously see. Which is why fixed foveated rendering rendering is just a crutch and you really need working eye tracking to fully use high FoV displays. And why we are still far of from displays that match the full human vision. Ideally you’d want a renderer that gives you very high details at e.g. 45Hz at the center and a gradually lower resolution with less color accuracy, but frequency going up to 120Hz towards the edges.

            You can actually do nifty tricks with the limited FoV. You can have low-res objects blink, which would look unnatural if you looked directly at them, but it will only be recognized as “something changed” in your peripheral vision, causing the player to look there. Or you can color the edges of the vision, e.g. red or green for a health bar. You will not be able to see them, but you will “know that they are there” and still get the information. Also requires eye tracking and has to be calibrated for every player by moving them just outside their direct vision.

    • Elite-Force_Cinema

      And disappointing means you do not like the company! Get your facts right on what the word disappointing means, you FOV shill!!!!

  • Sean Lumly

    In my opinion: this should have been the norm since the beginning of this young industry.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Oh yeah, technology that wasn’t available 5-6 years ago, or even in the 90’s.

      • Lucidfeuer

        It was

        • Andrew Jakobs

          No it wasn’t. there weren’t this high resolution displays in such small formfactor, nor at the needed framerate. Certainly not at prices well below $2k per display.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            While I agree that it wasn’t feasible, we have had high resolution screens for a while. The Gear VR was launched for the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 with an 2560*1440 OLED, released in 2014. When the Vive and CV1 released two years later, they were using two shortened 1080p displays instead of the already available 1440p ones.

            And the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium launched in 2015 with a full 4K resolution LCD or 2160*1920 per eye, so seven years before the PSVR2 launches as a 4K HMD. At least the Samsung display could have been driven at 90Hz. DisplayPort 1.3 from 2014 allows driving 4K@120Hz. And the displays weren’t that much more expensive, a high end phone display usually costs USD 60-100, maybe a little more in extreme cases, if you buy a couple of millions of them.

            The problem is more in the hardware driving the displays. The 2.5K display in the Vive Pro 2 will not add USD 100 on top of the price of the Vive Pro, but the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 most certainly will. That is acceptable for a Varjo XR-3, but makes no sense for a consumer product. Which is why I agree with your assessment that the technology wasn’t available and demanding to make these specs the norm since the beginning makes no sense.

          • MosBen

            The difference is cost. The CV1 was several hundred dollars less than the cost of a premium cell phone, even with the subsidies that lots of cell phone companies put in place in order to get people on cell phone service contracts. The Gear VR benefitted from the fact that people who had a Galaxy Note 4 had already sunk the money into their cell phone and could therefore focus on a relatively cheap case and software to run things. The CV1 also had manual IPD since it had two separate displays instead of one big display.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            It is only partly cost. The Note 4 had a 1440p display, but the GPU couldn’t drive this resolution in VR, so pretty much all VR games were rendered at 1024p or less and then upscaled. Which worked decently well thanks to good video upscalers on mobile SoCs, so at least the screen door effect was less noticeable with the aspheric lenses. The primary reason to use the Note 4 was that it had the fastest mobile GPU to be even able to drive a hires display, not necessarily the display resolution itself.

            On tethered HMDs we tend to do the opposite, rendering at higher than native resolution and then scale down to improve the image quality. And since you can select the GPU independent from the display, it makes more sense to go with a resolution that you can actually render at. You can use a Vive Pro 2 with a GTX 970, render at 1440p and upscale to 2.5K, but it is not a good idea.

          • MosBen

            But wasn’t the point of Andrew Jakub’s post that “at the start of the industry”, which we can charitably interpret to mean 2011-2013, the technology didn’t exist for displays of the type being used in the PSVR 2 at the framerate that the PS5 will drive it, and at the cost that Sony will charge? I feel like you were arguing against that position, but it seems like your post argues in favor of it. We’re seeing products like the PSVR 2 now because the technology has improved such that we can now get these specs with good framerates at a console peripheral price, which we could not do several to many years ago. Companies weren’t releasing lower quality products for funzonies.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            I’m agreeing with him that it wouldn’t have worked, upvoted his answer and only went into details when he added ” there weren’t this high resolution displays in such small formfactor, nor at the needed framerate. Certainly not at prices well below $2k per display.” to “technology that wasn’t available 5-6 years ago.“, because that is not true, the displays actually were available at that time, it just made no sense to use them in consumer VR HMDs.

            I’d also say that the 1080p for the PSVR was a very wise decision by Sony, even if they already had 4K displays, as the limiting factor was the PS4. But technically the GPU in the PS4 should be able to display 4K, the 4K display would have added less than USD 100 to the PSVR , and increasing the FoV is basically a question of changing the lenses. Wearality started a Kickstarter in 2015 for their custom VR Fresnel lenses, providing 140° FoV. Mostly to advertise the technology, and as there were no HMDs with removable lenses on the market, they offered it for Google Cardboard. I had lengthy discussions with one of their engineers about the ludicrousness of putting the highest FoV lenses on the lowest performance VR devices, but he insisted that you could usable VR experiences with it, which I cannot deny.

            There is a big difference between “technology doesn’t exist” and “technology doesn’t make sense” that a lot of people ignore. Higher FoV is one area where improvements would be technically easy to achieve, but you end up with an extremely unbalanced and barely usable system. Which is why making the distinction is important.

            The first VR HMD was Sword of Damocles in 1968, and it had a vertical resolution of about 3000 lines (analogue, monochrome CRT), but all it could display were wireframe models of a few cubes, because computers couldn’t render anything more complex. NASA build their own VR headsets out of 220p pocket TVs in 1990, because VPL’s 640p 90° FoV EyePhone was too expensive at USD 50,000 and required a USD 500,000 SGI workstation to run. The NASA VIEW HMD blew up that 220p to an 120° FoV. And this wasn’t an experiment, this was a working tool, and you can still download their paper on “Virtual Interface Environment Workstations” from 1988, including lengthy FoV discussions.

            It is often wrong to argue that something cannot or could not be done. Could the Vive, CV1 or PSVR have launched at 4K 140° FoV in 2016? Yes, they could have, the technology existed, including GPUs that could drive 4K, at least for simple scenes. Would that have made any sense? Heck no.

            Feasibility is usually not about the existence of particular technology, but about certain use cases. You can combine the USD 5000 Vario XR-3 with an RTX 3090 backpack PC for a killer mobile HMD today, and it may make a lot of sense, just like a 120° 220p NASA VIEW did 30 years ago. Depending on your use case you may primarily need resolution, FoV, refresh rate, long battery life, being unthethered, highest comfort, durability or low cost, and whether something exists or works depends on a balance for your use case. Had Andrew included such a disclaimer about “existing technology”, I would have typed a lot less.

          • MosBen

            Alright, thanks for the clarification.

          • Lucidfeuer

            YES, it was standardised with XR2 and existed way before, but I wasn’t talking about just the resolution.

      • Sean Lumly

        Ermmm.. A focus on hybrid games — the title (and supposed thesis) of the article.

  • mappo

    Have they stated whether it’ll be single panel or dual panels? The phrasing used here implies single panel, which would be disappointing.

    • Charles

      “4.1MP (2,000 × 2,040) per-eye resolution OLED” implies to me that it’s 2 screens.

      • mappo

        I think that statement is unclear and could be interpreted either way, and the other mention of the screen/s:

        , “The headset’s display is said to be an HDR-capable OLED”

        is definitely singular. But there’s no explicit mention of either single or dual panels, hence my question.

        • Aeroflux

          It would be a bit misleading if they have a single panel with IPD adjustment. Two screens would be necessary just for that mechanical process to have the full resolution per eye.

          • Bob

            It’s possible they could go the Quest 2 route and only allow users to change between set IPDs as opposed to a more granular approach which would require two displays.

  • Nothing to see here

    Not going to be too picky with the next PSVR. Whatever it is, it will be a massive upgrade to the current PSVR. The feature I really want is something smaller and lighter than the current bulky headset.

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  • jbob4mall

    It has to be much cheaper than the quest 2.

    • R3ST4RT

      Why? Because you need to buy a PS5? Also, I don’t believe it would be possible to sell it much cheaper than a Quest 2. Facebook is already taking a loss on the hardware in an attempt to dominate the VR space and make money on software.

      • jbob4mall

        Yeah. Quest is both a headset and console. And they’re not just competing against stand alone quest’s, they’re competing with pcvr. Frankly, I really do not want to go back to console gaming. Might as well get a quest and a pc. Unless it’s significantly cheaper to make the value worth it to make up for all the cons of console gaming.

      • jbob4mall

        Also, most people are buying quest 2’s because it’s cheap enough to try vr while allowing you to upgrade to a pcvr. PS4+vr, pcvr is too expensive to find out if I one likes vr or not.

    • Aeroflux

      The price of the Quest 2 is not based on hardware cost alone. They subsidize it with access to your data. It’s ~$800 without that access. That’s the real price of a Quest 2.

      • jbob4mall

        Trust me, Sony loves your data as well. Stop fear mongering. I actually approve of the Facebook account since it means they can police the racists and homophobes and other assholes. Which is probably the real reason people hate fb account. They can’t use anonymity to hurt people anymore.

        • silvaring

          ‘Who watches the watchers’

          • RFC

            The Watchmen?

        • Bob

          “Sony loves your data as well.”

          Sony make their money through hardware and software sales, not advertising. They couldn’t care less about what you look like or how many siblings you have. The data they extract from their users isn’t in the same boat as Facebook meaning information that could identify you.

        • MosBen

          That is absolutely ridiculous and shows a vast ignorance of the privacy issues that have been discussed, particularly with regards to FB, over the last several years. Tamping down on racists and homophobes is great. Gathering gobs of information about you to sell to advertisers is not.

      • Blaexe

        That’s not correct. Business versions have always been more expensive (Go, Quest), even when there was no requirement for a Facebook account.

      • MosBen

        To be fair, console makers subsidize the cost of their hardware as well. That’s less the case with peripherals, but it seems fairly likely that the PSVR2 will be sold at a loss, with the expectation that they’ll make up the difference with software sales. If I remember correctly, the original PSVR started at $300, and that’s probably about where I’d expect the PSVR2 to land as well.

      • shadow9d9

        No, stop repeating nonsense. 1. it is not worth 800. 2. They subsidize it with a cut on all games sold.

  • wheeler

    Hopefully they have some “designed from the ground up for VR” AAA stuff. Flat->VR conversions like the NMS port can make VR seem like a gimmick.

    If we’re talking late 2022 / early 2023, you need to give people a better reason to wear a headset than just VR’s visual perspective (which is still quite limited and uncomfortable) and gimmicky motion controller mappings on top of flat inputs. The honeymoon phase doesn’t last forever and they’re going to have to impress a large number of existing PSVR gamers for whom that initial distraction of pure VR spectacle (that VR companies can coast on for a while in new markets) won’t hold up as well. If you have the resources, show people the real value of VR with AAA productions that actually take advantage of VR. E.g. get Kojima working on a VR title and let him flesh out and obsess over the interactive affordances of VR–he would make H3VR levels of firearm simulation a side mode.

    • User

      I think Sim Racing games, Borderlands 2 VR, Skyrim and Resident Evil 7 proves you can have good conversions of flat screen to VR.

      I get what you’re saying, is important to have native VR games, but conversion of flat games to VR is a cheaper way of getting high budget game that otherwise wouldn’t be made exclusively for VR and give it to the VR audience, think of it as an extra.

      Game development cost is skyrocketing, and VR is a niche within a niche of console/PC gaming, hybrid games are a great way to justify bigger budgets and more attention to detail.

      We still need native VR games to explore the unique capabilities of this medium.

      But I don’t think we should exclude flat games from coming to VR, sim racing games, flight sim games, 1st person shooters can be converted to VR with relatively simple effort.

  • Lucidfeuer

    FOV= In the trash. I’m not considering any new headset that doesn’t push beyond a 120° standard since current offers are already plentiful.

    • lol The average PSVR2 buyer won’t care or even know.

      • Lucidfeuer

        The average PSVR2 buyer is more proficient about VR than the average Oculus Quest buyer, but also as niche.

  • hugorune

    I want Fortnite on PSVR. Am I the only one??

    • Tommy

      Population One…

  • Meh for hybrid games, if a game is not thought with VR in mind since day 1, it is usually not fantastic in VR

    • Tommy

      Have you played Hellblade, No Man’s Sky, Project Cars, Alien Isolation, The Forest, Subnautica, GTA5, Doom 3, and even Minecraft. These are all excellent examples of why more games should have VR crossovers.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      A hybrid game and a game designed for pancake vision with VR added on later are not necessarily the same. You can absolutely design a game with VR in mind that work with and without VR, with slightly different mechanics for both. It can be as simple as reducing movement speed and including a more detailed environment, which only the VR players will really notice, though you will have do to a lot more to make it a good VR experience. Sony is basically encouraging game developers to include VR into their hybrid games designs from day one.

  • MosBen

    It’s a bit disappointing that the FOV is only 110 degrees, which is pretty much the view that we’ve have for years now. I really wish that we’d start to see VR trending towards 130 or 140 degrees FOV. From my understanding, normal human vision extends a bit beyond 180, but anything beyond 160 is light and color, primarily for detecting movement. I feel like 140 would probably still feel like you’re looking through a window, but at least it would feel like a really big window.

    That said, I don’t have a PS5 at the moment, but there’s a decent chance that I’ll pick one up for the PSVR2. Sony has done a pretty good job in fostering the industry and getting some good use out of their headset, even if it never had industry-leading specs.

  • Greyl

    Considering Sony are bringing their exclusives to PC and since VR is still a niche that they’re not going to make as much money from, it makes sense to port those VR games to PC as well.

  • Cless

    Damn, give me those juicy 2K OLED displays, make them RGB since you’re at it too… And if I can wish for something else, make them basestation compatible (that last one is DEFINITELY not happening hahaha)

  • Jonathan Winters III

    It’s downright SHOCKING Sony is releasing PSVR2 as a wired headset. Quest 2 can do wireless and it’s a MAJOR buy consideration. They should have put a 5ghz transmitter right into the PS5. No brainer. Sony really, really screwed up on that missing feature.

  • Hokhmah

    Really nice specs and I can tolerate that it’s tethered, but switching to Fresnel lenses is a step backward, especially when there are lots of rumors floating around that companies are working on similar priced but better alternatives (pancake, aspheric, …).