Playstation's Dominic Mallinson on the future of VR. He isn't necessarily talking about PSVR 2 in all of this, but it's interesting nonetheless, and some of it may be relevant to PS5.
".... This is the takeaway Mallinson talked about the most, both onstage and in our follow-up. He gave three examples of evolutionary hardware improvements first, and offered his predictions.
“The first is resolution,” Mallinson explained. “This is more pixels per degree. It’s about the sharpness and the clarity of the display. And you have to be able to match what people expect to see today with high definition. I would expect the resolution to roughly double in the next set of VR products.”
“Along with that, we also need a greater field of view,” he continued. “The human visual system is out to about 180 degrees. Most VR headsets today are about 100 degrees. There are diminishing returns to get wider. But I would expect the next set of products to be roughly 120 degrees in terms of field of view.
“And finally, HDR. In the TV industry, HDR is already incredibly important to creating the best experiences. The human eye sees an enormous range of light from bright sunlight to deep shadow. Today’s VR panels only capture a tiny fraction of that. So in order to increase the sense of presence, I do expect to see HDR adopted in the near future.”
And with that, Mallinson quickly moved to revolutionary changes.
Mallinson cares a lot about wireless high-end VR because of the adoption implications.
“User comfort is incredibly important in order to widen the adoption of virtual reality,” Mallinson emphasized. “There are many aspects to user comfort. I’m just going to touch on one here. And that is the cable. Being tethered to this cable is inconvenient. And it’s not just about getting tangled up in the cable. It’s not just about the restriction in your motion. It’s also about how you set things up, how you configure the system, where you store it. Let’s face it, having a mess of cables in your living space is just not attractive. So this is something that we have to solve in order to get wider adoption.”
He offered two solutions: an all-in-one headset, where the compute is part of the headset, and using wireless transmission technology to replace the cable. [....]
Multiple versions
The second takeaway led us to an obvious follow-up question: Are there plans to modularize PSVR2? Not exactly, but there could be multiple versions.
“It’s certainly an option,” Mallinson agreed. “I talked about wireless, for example. That’s one easy way to do it. Here’s a wired headset. You can take the wire and replace it with wireless. And then you can have a range. So you can have an introductory model and a high-end model. That’s something we’ve done with PlayStation 4. We could do that with PSVR.”
Mallinson didn’t commit to anything, but the options he raised will send the rumor mill into overdrive.
Saving the best for last, Mallinson talked about the form of user input that he believes will succeed touch.
“Gaze tracking — this is the technology that excites me the most,” Mallinson declared. “We’re already beginning to see this in some products on display at industry events. I think it has the greatest potential to change the VR user experience at a pretty fundamental level. [more about this and other stuff at the link]
[....]
What does Sony need to do to keep up momentum for PSVR?
“Many, many things. The most important one is to keep good content coming through the pipeline. To really encourage all the developers out to there to make more great VR content. That is number one. From a hardware point of view, it is the comfort and the encumberance of the device. So the easier to take it off, the easier it is to set it up, and have a very comfortable, ergonomic experience, that’s our biggest goal.”
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/23/...less-gaze-tracking-foveated-rendering-and-ar/
In terms of PSVR 2.0, the takeaway for me is that there could potentially be two different versions of PSVR offered with the PS5 -- a wired model and a high-end, wireless model. It sounds like he's just tossing out possibilities, not hinting at what will actually happen, so who knows, but I'm imagining a scenario where an improved wired model comes out alongside the PS5, and then a wireless model is released a few years later -- analogous to how the Pro came out a few years after the base PS4.