Sony has pulled back the curtain on PlayStation 5’s next-gen PSVR headset, which now has an official name: PlayStation VR2. Bet you’d never have predicted that, eh? Alongside the moniker comes news of a brand-new game: Horizon Call of the Mountain, which is being developed in collaboration between two first-party PlayStation teams, Guerrilla Games and Firesprite Games. You can read more about that through here.

A lot of today’s news officially confirms rumours we’ve shared in the past: PS VR2 has a kind-of built-in rumble and is capable of eye-tracking. It’ll also work in tandem with the two previously revealed motion wands, which are now officially known as PS VR2 Sense controllers. The setup utilises “inside-out” tracking, meaning the controllers are tracked by cameras on the headset itself.

This means that you can face any direction, and you won’t lose tracking, which is a marked improvement upon the original PSVR which required you to face a camera directly in front of you. The headset’s packing a 4K HDR OLED screen with a 110-degree viewing angle and a resolution of 2000x2040 per eye.

The PS VR 2 Sense controllers are tracked by four cameras in the headset, and feature haptic feedback, touch sensors, and adaptive triggers.

To compare this to the previous PSVR headset, it had a 100-degree viewing angle at a resolution of 960x1080 per eye, so this is an absolutely gigantic leap in terms of overall image quality. The headset feedback – powered by a rumble motor within the headset itself – promises new tactile sensations, like “the rush of objects passing by”. Apparently, it could also help with motion sickness.

Meanwhile, the headset can also read the direction of your eyes. There’s mention of foveated rendering in Sony’s official blog post – this is technology that works in tandem with eye-tracking to reduce computational overheads by lessening the detail of assets in your peripheral vision – but it’s claimed this will also be utilised to “allow players to interact more intuitively in new and lifelike ways”.

There’ll be a single cord running from your console to the headset, and you won’t need any other cameras or peripherals, beyond the aforementioned PS VR2 Sense controllers. There’s still no actual image of what the headset looks like, but apparently it’s scheduled to go into manufacturing soon, so we doubt you’ll be waiting too much longer for the details.

In the meantime, here are all the specs:

PlayStation VR2 Full Specs

Specs PS VR 2 PSVR
Display OLED OLED
Resolution 2000x2040 per eye 960x1080 per eye
Refresh Rate 120hz, 90hz 120hz, 90hz
Field of View ~110-degrees ~100-degrees
Cameras Four for inside-out tracking of PS VR2 Sense controllers None
Connection USB Type-C HDMI, USB
Audio Built-in microphone and stereo headphone jack Built-in microphone and stereo headphone jack
Feedback Rumble motor None

What are your thoughts on PS VR2? These are certainly very impressive specs, which should dovetail nicely with all of the other advantages of the PS5, like its SSD for example. However, the price is clearly going to be high, so we’d recommend you start saving now – it’s going to cost a fortune for a bundle with the headset and those new controllers in it.

[source blog.playstation.com]