Sony has announced it’s working on a new virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 5, but it won’t be out this year.
In a post on the PlayStation Blog, Hideaki Nishino, the senior vice president of PlayStation’s Platform Planning & Management division, explained the next iteration of PlayStation VR will see some technical enhancements to the resolution, field of view, as well as tracking player inputs. For those that weren’t a fan of the mess of cords and adapters required to set up the original PlayStation VR, you’ll be happy to know that the new headset features a single cord input that you plug directly into your PS5.
While the headset itself will be a bit beefier, Sony is also working on a dedicated VR controller to go along with it. According to the announcement, it will be bringing in some features from the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller. There’s no specificity here, but presumably this means things like haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, which have been used to great effect in games like Astro’s Playroom. I personally haven’t been super impressed with those features, but enough people like them that Microsoft is asking Xbox users if they’d like them in future iterations of its controllers, as well.
That’s about it as far as details go. There’s no images or design docs to give us a sense of if the thing will look much different than the headset on the market now. But it makes sense that Sony is keeping specifics close to the chest, as Nishino says the headset won’t be out in 2021.
There’s still a lot of development underway for our new VR system, so it won’t be launching in 2021. But we wanted to provide this early update to our fans, as the development community has started to work on creating new worlds for you to explore in virtual reality.
We also want to thank all of our PS VR players for your continued support — with upcoming games like After The Fall, Sniper Elite VR, and Humanity, there’s much more to come for PS VR whether you’re playing on PS4 or PS5. With both PlayStation VR and the next-generation VR system we’re building, our commitment to virtual reality as a medium for games is stronger than ever. We look forward to sharing more details in the future!
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The original PlayStation VR headset launched in 2015, and is useable with the PlayStation 5 now to play backwards compatible VR games. It’s unclear at this point if that headset will be compatible with games forever, or if there will one day be a point where you have to upgrade to play the latest hotness. Sony calls the new controller “one of the examples of future-proof technology we’re developing,” which implies this might be a sort of starting point and basis for future VR games on PlayStation. Right now, the PlayStation VR uses PlayStation Move controllers, which began as a PlayStation 3 peripheral over a decade ago. So it’s probably time for an update. As such, if you were thinking about maybe buying a PlayStation VR headset, it might be best to hold off until details about whether or not the original will be compatible with games moving forward.
