Yet the next session in the same environment would be fine. In general, the motion tracking reliability ranges from adequate to flakey, especially on Move controllers – for no reason I could pinpoint, it would sometimes wig out and one of my in-game hands would vanish or start flying away uncontrollably. (It’s difficult to directly compare the PlayStation Camera to the Rift’s single sensor because the Touch controllers aren’t available yet, but from my experience with head tracking the Rift’s field of view seems wider.) Any time your body is between your hands and the PlayStation Camera, it has no way of knowing where they are and completely loses the ability to track them. See more PlayStation VR launch game reviews here.Īlso, that inherent limitation means that even though we’re being immersed in a 360-degree virtual world where things can happen anywhere, we’ll never be able to turn around 180 degrees and shoot a monster that pops up behind us. You can tell someone they’re not supposed to do that until you’re blue in the face, but considering the whole point of VR is to fool people’s brains into thinking what they’re seeing is real, they will still make that mistake from time to time. All the games I’ve played thus far (such as Job Simulator, Tumble VR, and Batman) have accounted for this by simply warping items back to the playable height if you drop them, but it’s jarring to have your hand stop two feet from your target. With the recommended six feet of distance between me and the camera, I find I have to frequently adjust the angle to cover me when switching between a standing experience like Batman: Arkham VR and a sitting one like SuperHyperCube.Īnd even in the best-case scenario, it can’t cover your whole body and the floor around you, so if you see something shiny on or near the ground you can’t reach down to pick it up. It does work reasonably well thanks to the depth-sensing capabilities of its two lenses, but its field of view is narrow enough that I frequently bumped up against its limits with the Move controllers. Relative to the Vive and its two sensors placed in opposite corners of your play area, the PlayStation VR’s reliance on its single camera is a significant weakness. The other crucial part of a VR setup like this one is the motion tracking, and here is where I felt the pinch most. And with several people in the IGN office playing games on it over the past week, none has reported any unusual problems with nausea. Again, it will never look as good as a Rift or a Vive on a gaming PC, which are capable of producing sharper and more detailed images, but the PlayStation VR does the job adequately. That’s in both high-detail games like Batman: Arkham VR or EVE Valkyrie and low-detail ones like Tumble VR or Job Simulator. So far it has kept up admirably, with no significant frame rate dips in any of the games I’ve tried. One of the big questions going in was whether the PlayStation 4 had enough horsepower to run games at the 90-frames-per-second rate that VR demands in order to minimize nausea. The field of view on the PlayStation VR is slightly lower than its competitors (meaning the goggles look thicker) but in the same ballpark the differences between the three are minor enough that unless you’re directly comparing one after another you’re unlikely to notice. No matter which headset you choose you’ll see virtual worlds through what looks like SCUBA goggles. So, combined with the fact that it hooks up to a $299.99 PlayStation 4 instead of a gaming PC that would cost you $700 or more, the PlayStation VR is by far the cheapest option for good-quality VR with motion control. The HTC Vive, which includes its two Lighthouse sensors and motion controllers, costs $799.99 the Oculus Rift is $599.99 and comes with one sensor and an Xbox One controller (and its wireless dongle), but Oculus will soon release its Touch controllers for an as-yet-unannounced price that is speculated to be in the range of $200. Bundles (like the one on which this review is based) are available with the full set for $499.99, which is still a major price advantage. Additionally, many of the launch games either require or make use of one or two motion-tracked PlayStation Move controllers, which must also be purchased separately for between $20 and $30 each. Though the PlayStation VR is advertised at only $399.99, that price is misleading because it’s mostly useless without the $59.99 PlayStation Camera, which is sold separately.
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