Sony has been awfully quiet about the follow-up to its PSVR headset, which was initially released back in October 2016. Today the company publicly announced it is indeed working on its next-generation VR headset for PS5 consoles. There’s only a few scraps of info for now, but there should be plenty of time to tease out the specifics. In short: it’s looking to be a vastly improved piece of kit.

Hideaki Nishino, Sony’s senior VP of Platform Planning & Management, announced in a blogpost that the next-gen VR headset for PS5 is coming. Exactly when, we aren’t sure, but Nishino says we shouldn’t expect it in 2021.

Sony’s next-gen VR headset will enable “dramatic leaps in performance and interactivity,” Nishino says, and that players will feel “an even greater sense of presence and become even more immersed in their game worlds once they put on the new headset.”

Original PSVR (2016) & PS5 console | Photo by Road to VR

The company reveals it’s enhancing everything “from resolution and field of view to tracking and input.” The headset, which is still unnamed, is slated to connect to PS5 with a single cord to simplify setup and improve ease-of-use.

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And if you were wondering whether Sony is finally kicking PS Move to the curb, you’ll be happily surprised to hear that the company is releasing an entirely new VR controller. It’s said to include “some of the key features found in the DualSense wireless controller,” which is also focusing on ergonomics.

DualSense has some genuinely impressive haptics, which includes adaptive triggers for more immersive feedback, and it’s exactly the sort of leap in ergonomics and haptics we wanted to see in the hands of PSVR players.

We’re still looking around for fresh info on Sony’s next VR headset. Stay tuned as new information comes in.

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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.
  • blue5peed

    My hype is immeasurable and my day is made.

  • 3872Orcs

    Awesome!

    Though I’d prefer if it was wireless. After owning a wireless Vive Pro and a Quest the future of VR is wireless for me.

    So if any of the competition launch a next gen wireless headset that is probably what I’ll get.

    • MosBen

      I keep hoping that VR gets to its wireless future soon, but I haven’t seen any news or advances in that area in a while, and none of the major HMDs are wireless or have wireless addons, from what I can tell. I’m no engineer, but it just seems like as the resolutions and FOV have continued to increase there might simply be too much information going back and forth between the headset and the PC to use a wireless connection.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      You’re right, as the PS5 also supports wifi6, I was hoping the headset would come with wireless build in (and be able to use an extra powerbank (on your belt or something) to power the headset.
      I would love to have the wireless module for the Pro, but I think it’s way too expensive, you can buy a complete Quest2 for the same price. If it were more like $100 I would instantly buy it as the cable is the biggest complaint I have about that headset.

  • Casino

    How much are we gonna bet that the controllers will have similar finger tracking like the Index controllers? Possibly even the straps too.

    • Adam Broadhurst

      Sony had a patent a few years ago that was something similar to what you’re describing.
      Lets hope thats what we get because Index controllers are currently the best around.

    • Bob

      Yes there was indeed a patent that showed a Valve Index-like controller with simulated finger tracking on the grips.

  • Kevin White

    I’m sure this will be an LCD-based system with FOV somewhere between
    PSVR1 and Index and without anything fancy such as eye tracking.

    Too bad about the wire. The PSVR came out 13 October 2016 and the wireless adapter for Vive was made available 4 September 2018. Let’s make an assumption that PSVR2 hits in late Q3 or early Q4 2022 — that will be six years since PSVR1 and four years since the Vive and Vive Pro went wireless. And how long will PSVR2 be the default Playstation VR system? At least four years? So PSVR2 players would still be tethered fully ten years after the PSVR1 came out and eight years after the Vive went wireless.

    I’ll be slightly skeptical about the controllers until I find out how they’re tracked. There is loads of room for improvement in the PSVR controllers themselves… but just upgrading from Move doesn’t necessarily mean the fundamental tracking scheme (for controllers or headset) will be improved. That is ultimately what I want to hear more about.

    • Adam Broadhurst

      I think you’re underselling it.
      I’d expect it to match the Index headsets quality easily and the controllers should be at least better the touch controllers,perhaps even the Index conttrollers.Remember this is the company that has just released the best gamepad ever made.
      Along with that we have the potential for truly AAA VR from Sony’s top game studios.
      With PCVR going down the limited capability standalone route,quality games are becoming increasingly rare..
      I have a RTX 3080 powered GPU,I want to be blown away by graphics instead I get endless amatuerish junk on PCVR.

      Hopefully Sony will make VR spectacular again.

      • FrankB

        The Dualsense is something else, a real step up in gamepad design. Sony clearly know their stuff. The Move controllers were bad but seeing as they are from PS3 era it was clearly a cut corner while they tested the market.

      • MosBen

        Eh, I get that the feedback in the Dualsense is supposed to be great, but unless or until the controller is shaped like and has the layout of an Xbox controller, I wouldn’t consider it the best gamepad. I don’t mean this to be a console war nonsense comment. I’ve just always hated the shape and layout of the Playstation gamepads. That combined with the fact that my friends mostly own Xboxes, making multiplayer easier on that platform, has pretty much kept me from buying any Sony systems even though they have some games that look like fun.

      • Kevin White

        From a games / software perspective, I agree with you, there is much to be excited about from Sony VR in the future. I want more assurance they’re on the right track as far as the hardware, but we’ll see.

    • MosBen

      I don’t know. I know that wireless solutions were released for the Vive, but I don’t really see anyone talking about wireless adapters on the PC side anymore, or any news on the development of wireless tech. Is there a wireless device that works with, say, the Index or the Reverb G2, which seem like the top of the line PC VR HMDs at the moment? It doesn’t seem like Pimax ever followed through with their wireless solution.

      It just feels like wireless tethered VR isn’t there yet, even though it would be nice.

      • Kevin White

        Nope, nothing wireless for Index or Reverb G2 on the horizon that I’ve heard of. I believe Valve has mentioned maybe starting to consider thinking about it. I read somewhere that it was more difficult with WMR-based tracking because more data (in the form of low-resolution “pictures” of your walls and floor) must be sent from the headset to the receiver.

        Haven’t heard anything about Pimax either.

        This is particularly frustrating since it was over four years ago (9 Feb 2017) that Gabe Newell stated, “wireless VR is a solved problem at this point,” and “wireless VR will be an add-on in 2017, and then it will be an integrated feature in 2018.”

        I’ve used a very good Vive Pro wireless setup extensively and it’s fantastic.

        • MosBen

          Thanks for confirming that. It feels like wireless VR is something that will come about once HMDs stabilize around a particular FOV and resolution. If you create a wireless solution that targets, say, the Vive Pro, and then suddenly there are headsets that require substantially more data to be transmitted in form of more pixels and tracking info, then it’s perfectly possible that your wireless solution won’t work with that volume of information.

          It’s less true that it was when the CV1 came out, but we’re still in the relatively early days of VR, and the hardware is advancing at an extremely fast rate. Once things slow down a bit, I suspect that that’s when we’ll see wireless become the default.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Well, the PS5 already supports the Wifi6 (and probably 6E in a whie). And a wifichip itself wouldn’t be that costly. Most of the current solutions for the previous headsets have all been somewhat of a custom solution, which makes it a lot more expensive. The wireless module for the HTC Vive Pro costs about the same as a complete Quest 2, so it’s a hard deal to not just buy the Q2 instead (although the tracking an comfort of the Pro is much better).

    • Bob

      “I’m sure this will be an LCD-based system with FOV somewhere between
      PSVR1 and Index and without anything fancy such as eye tracking.”

      One of the key features of the PSVR is its display in regards to colors, contrast and clarity which stems from it’s RGB OLED panel and aspheric lenses. There’s nothing quite like it on the consumer market at its price point so I’m on the opposite side of your theory here; I don’t think Sony will be too happy regressing as opposed to progressing in this particular area.

      Given their existing experience with television displays and vast network of manufacturing capacity, it shouldn’t be too difficult at all for Sony to use their reach and resources to carry the same technology they used with the PSVR into the PSVR 2 except with an obvious upgrade in order to reach the standards of today. It’s clear that they intend to mass produce the device à la
      a games console which would assist in driving costs down.

      At most we’re looking at 2160 x 2160 per eye (HP Reverb G2 standard) with RGB OLED and upgraded aspherical lenses. Bear in mind the bulk of the cost of the headset alone will come from its display and lenses (a chipset is not needed) which will mean the cost of the controllers will probably not be factored in.

      • Kevin White

        I definitely agree Sony had the right idea with the only RGB Stripe OLED screen and non-Fresnel lenses. Though it’s lower resolution than competing headsets even from 2016, you can just tell from, say, watching a film through them that it was a superior implementation.

        I’m skeptical that they’ll continue the RGB OLED / non-Fresnel path though. Things are very different now than in 2014-2015 when Project Morpheus was being developed (and Sony switched from LCD to OLED halfway through). But maybe they’ll do their own thing and impress us.

    • namekuseijin

      tethered x untethered is a false dicothomy

      Quest is untethered and yet I play it sitting, same way as psvr. cable is no concern here.

      psvr has actually roomscale, but pretty limited because you need to stand facing a camera. you won’t need a camera again (we hope), so roomscale will be as good as any other out there with cables…

      • Kevin White

        Sure, there are plenty of VR experiences for Quest / standalone, PCVR, or PSVR that involve sitting or not moving around much.

        I often use the term “standalone” to describe the Quest (unless you’re connecting it to a PC) and “tethered” or “untethered” to describe PCVR. I’ve used PCVR untethered using a really good Vive Pro Wireless setup in a large area and it is fantastic.

        PSVR was often referred to as “couch-scale” back in the early days. The cord is fairly short and the tracking scheme demands you stay in a fairly small trapezoidal area close to the camera (which is probably close to the TV which is probably a feet from the couch.

        If Sony intends to release another conservative “couch-scale” style system, then yah the cord won’t matter.

        The thing is, I’m not comparing the [presumed] 2022 PSVR2 to other systems out there with cables, I’m comparing it to my experience (over the past two and a half years) with a really excellent untethered Vive Pro, which will probably have been available for four years by the time PSVR2 debuts with its cable tether… and I maintain it is too bad about the wire…

        • namekuseijin

          you can have your full roomscale minigames about slashing boxes or flipping burgers, but for real, substantial games I’ll be playing sitting, either on psvr or Quest.

          • Kevin White

            LOL, okay you do that. Sounds boring to me but whatever.

  • MosBen

    Something that I find interesting about the PSVR is that it is so closely tied to a console generation. Other VR HMDs like the Quest or Index seem to hover around a 2-3 year lifespan. When you add in that there are some companies competing in the PC VR space, that means that new HMDs with updated specs aren’t coming out all the time, but fairly regularly. Meanwhile, the PSVR was unchanged during the life of the PS4, and the PSVR2 likely won’t be updated during the life of the PS5. Sure, that means that eventually the PSVR2 will lag behind in specs, but it also means that a customer can have a certain amount of certainty that they’ll be able to enjoy their VR setup for several years without any significant changes being necessary. And as a software company, Sony seems to have put a lot of focus on producing compelling content, which is an underappreciated aspect of the success of a VR headset, beyond its raw specs.

    Ok, here’s my speculation: I’m betting that the PSVR2, or whatever it’s called, ends up with a resolution roughly on par with the Reverb G2, inside out tracking with at least 5 cameras, 130 degree FOV, 120Hz refresh rates, and controllers that are strapped to the hand like the Index controllers and which incorporate feedback from the Dualsense technology. I don’t expect them to include full body tracking, though that would be pretty cool.

    I also have a sneaking suspicion that like with the PSVR, things will run on the PS5, but it won’t be until Sony releases a beefed up version of the console that everything runs perfectly.

    • Bob

      ” Sony releases a beefed up version of the console that everything runs perfectly.”

      Funnily enough the PS4 Pro launched on the same year as the PSVR but one area is rather concerning in regards to the rather drastic resolution bump.
      If those specs turn out to be true (2160 x 2160 per eye) then the question is how will Sony address the severe lack horsepower within the PS5 to drive such high resolutions while retaining high-fidelity graphics rendering? Rendering over nine million pixels at 90+ frames every second consistently for a AAA title seems like a very tall order for a system such as the PS5. Even with re-projection, it’s certainly no small task.

      Are there hidden machine learning image reconstruction cores similar to DLSS within the PS5 chipset that will assist in upscaling the image? To my knowledge I don’t believe these exist. And even if they do, this technology hasn’t been proven to work effectively within a VR environment as technologies such as DLSS 2.1 has yet to be efficiently demonstrated.

      Is there a proprietary and special “secret sauce” temporal reprojection method developed in-house at Sony that will allow for almost perfect upscaling?

      Will there be dynamic foveated rendering? If that were the case then eye tracking is mandatory which means additional cameras fitted on the interior of the headset. This means additional cost.

      The most interesting part about this headset is how PS5 will seemingly resolve and overcome the performance issues associated with the supposed G2-like resolutions and as far as I’m aware the PS5, at this very moment, has neither a software or a hardware solution to this problem.

      • MosBen

        Just to make sure that I haven’t created confusion, those specs were just my best guess at what we’ll see from the PSVR2 and aren’t based on any information or leaks that I’ve seen. I just think that it’s fun to put a marker down on what I expect/hope it’ll be and see how close I was when we get official information.

        So maybe the answer to your question is just that G2-like resolution is simply beyond the PS5 and they’ll end up with resolution closer to the Index. Or maybe there will be some creative solution that makes the vanilla PS5 limp along in VR, but the headset doesn’t really come into its own until the PS5+ or whatever comes out. For what it’s worth, with the PS5 released in 2020, we’d expect a Pro version probably in 2023 or so, and it seems like the PSVR2 isn’t expected until 2022 at the earliest, so who knows?

      • namekuseijin

        > how will Sony address the severe lack of horsepower within the PS5 to drive such high resolutions while retaining high-fidelity graphics rendering

        either with eye-tracked foveated rendering or with these new-fangled AI-assisted image reconstruction from low-res images. or even both.

    • namekuseijin

      console business is software, not hardware. Every year several pc headsets are announced never to be heard again – and they all always showcase the same superhot from eons ago!

      I’ve been consistently playing great games on psvr for the past 3+ years, without ever messing around with setups (even my cam is on same spot as ever) or game configurations to get anything running. It just works: you pay for the software, you play it.

      I think pc gaming should take a hint or two from console makers.

    • Adam Broadhurst

      Console games a generally much better optimized than PC games.
      Look at games such as RDR2,God of War,Ghosts of Tsushima,Last of Us 2,Death Stranding,Uncharted 4 and for PSVR RE7,Farpoint,Blood and Truth etc
      There’s a very long list of stunning games running perfectly well on very old PS4 hardware.

      • MosBen

        Right, but what’s the point that you’re making vis a vis PSVR2? Granted, I didn’t own a PS4 or PSVR, but from what I read about it, performance on the PS4 was ok, but not great, and the PSVR really benefitted from the PS4 Pro’s increased horse power. I just expect that we’ll see something similar, especially since my guess is that it seems like we’ll get the PSVR2 in 2022 and in 2023 or so we’ll see a PS5 Pro.

  • Bob

    Very good news.

    2022 will be an explosion of high-fidelity virtual reality HMDs if we include the following rumored releases:

    1. Valve Index 2
    2. Oculus Quest 3
    3. HTC Proton
    4. Apple VR
    5. Sony PSVR 2
    6. Samsung VR
    7. HP Reverb G3

  • Greyl

    Games like VRChat in all their glory still won’t be possible on a closed platform console, like PS5, due to DMCA concerns, as evident by the recent ToS changes to Dreams. At the end of the day, the enthusiast VR market; the 18-25 year old audience that watches Thrillseeker, etc, who cares about true VR experiences, with custom avatars, worlds, full body, etc, will still all be on PC.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      huh? what are you talking about? what DMCA concern? If it would be a problem on a console, it would also be a problem on the PC as a DMCA isn’t platform dependent, but content.

      • guest

        Consoles control both hardware and software publishing so they can be more easily sued.

      • Greyl

        Generally, most companies don’t care. But the main problem is that there is far more mainstream coverage and eyes on what goes on on console vs PC. Dreams attracted a ton of media coverage over the ability to play Nintendo content on PlayStation, which sparked Nintendo to DMCA strike the game. It’s more a case that VRChat doesn’t want its game to get that console exposure and open the fludgates to mainstream news and DMCA strikes.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          But Dreams was never blocked, only the specified content might get blocked, but that’s understandable.

          • Greyl

            I never implied the game as whole would be blocked, but if the content in the game is more suspectible to be blocked because of the mainstream attention on console, then it’s simply not worth bringing those sort of games to console.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            Why would it not be worth bringing those sort of games to the console? The actual creators of the game/app earn money buy selling it, and if people create content that might contain copyrighted content, then I don’t see any problem with that specific content being blocked.

          • Greyl

            The game is free. And content is more likely to be blocked by being on PlayStation, that’s the point I’m making, and why the devs continue to be tepid about bringing it to PSVR. Outside of that, there are also quality control matters, user generated content ratings regulations and server related things they have to deal with as Sony has a tighter verification process compared to Oculus/Steam.

    • namekuseijin

      that crap is not even a game, it’s a chat for furries!

      • Greyl

        You’ve never played it then, as there are tons of custom competitive and cooperative game worlds; it’s far better than what Rec Room allows. The horror maps in particular are brilliant with friends.

  • Zachary Scott Dickerson

    maybe by the time it comes out, we can buy a ps5 before the scalpers?

  • OK, NOW I feel like Sony has dealt the first proper [USP] death blow to Xbox Series X/S. Before, I wasn’t particularly interested in either of the next-gen consoles. Now PS5 absolutely has my attention. I look forward to 2022 (presumably)….

  • MosBen

    Well, I’ll certainly keep my fingers crossed, and hopefully that means that we’ll see HMDs with high resolution screens and built-in wireless coming to market. Still, it’s getting to be an awful long time for something which is a solved problem to be approved and make its way into consumer products, no? I mean, we’re going on 4 years and headsets like the Index and G2 weren’t released yet when this standard was supposed to be approved. Hell, the Vive Pro wasn’t even released then. How sure are we that this standard would work with whatever the generation of HMDs that comes after the Index and G2 turns out to be?

    • I spoke to a buddy this afternoon who is senior policy manager for government allocation of spectrum. He looked up the 802.11ay situation for me, confirmed it’s all been ratified, and is due for release in March.

      This means companies can bring product to market as soon as they have safety clearance (FCC) for each product being retailed.

      • Kevin White

        Good to hear.

      • Bob

        And this is a US thing only at the moment, right?

        • The release (802.11ay) is global, but FCC regulates wireless equipment on the US which includes all VR headsets

          For example the Valve Index headset, Frank Taylor, Counsel for Valve, authorised UL Verification Services, inc. on 28 November 2018, equipment testing resulted in:-

          FCC ID 2AES41007
          IC 20207-1007

          Wireless module PCVR devices may have been put forward for authorisation prior to the standard being released, so it’s possible we won’t be waiting too long.

  • oomph

    It should be light like spectacles such as of Nreal