What’s the VR situation on the newly released PS5 and Xbox Series S / X? Are we going to see a “rebirth” of VR on the next generation consoles or will it become an anecdote as quickly as the commercial life of the console generation that leaves us ends? Will the PC be the only viable platform for virtual reality in the end?
Virtual reality is not limited to placing a screen in front of our eyes, it is a medium in itself with its own standards, but one that has not quite taken off, especially when we consider the promise of a bright future in the world. mass market, a promise that seems to have been left half due to the limited adoption of virtual reality.
Although the PC is the platform on which new technologies are integrated into the market, in games it is on consoles where these technologies are standardized for the mass market. But, has VR managed to standardize on consoles after Sony’s attempt, how is virtual reality presented on PS5 and Xbox Series?
The commercial fiasco of Virtual Reality on consoles
If you ask people about Virtual Reality on consoles then the first thing they will tell you is that the PlayStation VR is a success, but they will not tell you that it has not had any rival in the console market, since neither Nintendo nor Microsoft had your responses to the PlayStation VR.
At the beginning of last year, SONY had sold 5 million PlayStation VRs worldwide, which means that about 5% of PlayStation 4 users have purchased Sony virtual reality glasses for their consoles, so without fear of being wrong that it has been a commercial fiasco for SONY. And it must be clarified that something is a commercial fiasco has nothing to do with its quality as a product but with the acceptance of the general public.
The truth is that Virtual Reality was very fair on previous generation consoles, so Microsoft, which had a slightly less powerful Xbox One, decided not to gamble, but it did not do so with its Xbox One X either, despite the fact that they initially announced that the most powerful of their consoles was going to have support for Virtual Reality.
The VR performance issue on the previous generation of consoles
To understand what the problem of Virtual Reality is, we have to take into account a concept called telepresence, which consists of making the viewer’s brain believe that it is in that place, for that the trick is to make the time in which we perform the action until we see the response the retina of our eyes must pass less than 20 ms.
This means that we have to have the ability to render a scene in a much lower time than the classic 16.67 ms for a game at 60 frames per second, since we also have to take into account the time of sending the image to the LCD screen of the Virtual Reality unit.
The principle is the same as that of the game in the cloud, to achieve the same visual quality in Virtual Reality combined with the sensation of presence we need a lot of power and it turns out that the previous generation of consoles fell a bit short, which led to the opinion In general, the next would be the definitive leap to virtual reality, a leap that certainly has not occurred and we really wonder if it will occur.
How is Virtual Reality on PS5 and Xbox Series S / X?
Neither SONY nor Microsoft have announced anything related to Virtual Reality, in the case of SONY it is assumed that they have a new version of their PlayStation VR in development if we pay attention to the existence of certain patents, but patents do not have to be translated into final products. As far as Microsoft is concerned, we have seen absolutely nothing announced, not even support for Windows Mixed Reality headsets.
This does not mean that we will not see virtual reality units in the future, but at the moment there is nothing announced and in the case of SONY, which has a product, it does not seem that they will get the PlayStation VR off the ground despite the improvement. on the hardware. But we cannot forget that in the case of the SONY console the games work in legacy mode, not taking advantage of all the power and there are no visual improvements for these.
So the bet on VR is nil in the new generation of consoles and the outlook is devastating in this regard, and no, it is not about seeing the glass half empty or being totally pessimistic, but to establish a reality of which suddenly everyone seems to have forgotten.
Where is the low cost virtual reality for PS5?
When PlayStation 5 was first presented on a physical level there was a port that caught our attention, a USB-C port.
That was enough to imagine a low-cost version of the PlayStation VR, which we only had to connect to that port in the hope that it was the Alt-DP type. If you have had a PlayStation VR you will know in advance the mess of cables that this entails when you need an intermediate box.
But the USB-C port is of the Superspeed USB type at 10 Gbps, it does not even support Display Port via USB-C, but it does not have enough bandwidth to transmit data to a virtual reality headset, not even the Original PlayStation VR.
But this is not the only negative point, the new SONY camera for PS5 is not compatible with the current PlayStation VR and it is necessary to purchase the old camera, which also needs a special adapter, since the modified USB port that it used did not found on PS5, adding an additional cost.
The fact that PSVR games cannot be adapted to take advantage of the new camera comes from the fact that officially at the SDK level, and at least for the moment, PlayStation VR games are considered previous generation games. This means that either there is an improved version of them optimized for PS5 or SONY has decided to close the business forever and will wait for the cleaning of the console stock to announce the end of its adventure in virtual reality.
And what about the Xbox Series S / X?
In the case of Microsoft, its commitment to VR was nil during the previous generation, but we do not believe that in the case of betting on VR Microsoft will develop its own glasses, but rather that it can give compatibility to a specific model made by a third party. Windows Mixed Reality and re-branding them under the Xbox brand, of course, as long as it enters into Microsoft’s future plans for Xbox.
What Microsoft has done is eliminate the separation of the code between PC and Xbox in the new generation, before it was necessary to adapt and make certain changes in the games, in the case of Xbox Series X / S that is no longer necessary and in reality it running is the Windows version with an associated configuration file, this should greatly facilitate porting games intended for virtual reality to next-gen Xbox.
This has led to some games such as Flight Simulator on PC where there will be support for virtual reality, some believe that we are going to unequivocally see a virtual reality headset on Xbox, when one thing has nothing to do with the other. Moreover, from Microsoft’s perspective they have information on the viability of the virtual reality market.
Seeing the enormous success of the PlayStation VR in recent years from Microsoft they have a reference about what is the level of acceptance of virtual reality and since they have not talked about it at any time we can conclude that they are not going to bet on the virtual reality.
The PC is the solution for Virtual Reality
In the end, the conclusion is that if you want to enjoy virtual reality, it is best to bet on the PC, since it is the only platform in which VR not only has a face and eyes but also a future. So if you are saving to make a setup for Virtual Reality and you want to have the best experience with this medium, the best thing is to set up a personal computer focused on VR and not wait for something that has not even been officially announced.
Mainly because virtual reality on PS5 and Xbox Series is conspicuous by its absence, since it is something that nobody is talking about and not only the media but also the manufacturers, so it is the elephant in the room that is there, but that nobody wants to see. And it is that neither SONY nor Microsoft has any interest in virtual reality in their new generation consoles.
