A woman plays the ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission at the Playstation VR screen at the Sony Showcase at the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES 2019 in Las Vegas on January 9, 2019.
David McNew | AFP | Getty Images
Sony has announced new details about its next-generation virtual reality headset and has ridiculed what the experience will look like in a demo of the upcoming PlayStation game.
At a CES tech event in Las Vegas, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan confirmed that its new hardware will be called PlayStation VR2, replacing its predecessor PS VR. The headset will work with the Sony PlayStation 5 console, which was released in late 2020.
The PS VR2 will come with an OLED display that supports 4K resolution, as well as a new controller called the PS VR2 Sense, according to Blog post Posted by Sony on Tuesday. It will connect to the PS5 via a single wire.
The system will also have eye-tracking technology that affects how the player interacts with the game, and a built-in engine with vibrations to create feedback on the headset.
While Sony hasn’t revealed what its new headset will look like, the company has taken an early look at the in-game experience, showing off the trailer for a new game called Horizon: Call of the Mountain.
The game takes place in the same universe as Sony’s blockbuster action game Horizon, which sees players fighting dinosaur-like machines in a post-apocalyptic world.
The series began with Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, and Sony is set to release a sequel called Horizon Forbidden West next month.
The unveiling of Sony’s PS VR2 hardware comes at a particularly opportune time as Meta parent company Facebook and others are trying to cash in on a tumultuous new trend in technology – the “metaverse”. It is a kind of shared virtual experience where users can work, play and interact with each other. Many iterations of the metaverse incorporate virtual reality technology.
The Meta brand was rebranded from Facebook last year in a hub to the metaverse. The Oculus Quest 2 VR headset was a popular gift during the holidays, with the main Oculus app topping the rankings in the Apple App Store on Christmas Day.
However, some experts are concerned about the security of the metaverse. Most VR systems lack parental controls, and apps like VRChat are riddled with abuse.
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