After receiving praise from a dumbfounded Lucky Palmer, Playstation VR ends up at the center of new speculations, this time regarding its possible use on PC as it was for its predecessor.
If with the first version of Sony’s VR headset managed to create a PC compatibility driver (iVRy Driver for SteamVR), Mediator Software is not at all sure of being able to replicate the operation with PlayStation VR 2. A developer has therefore strongly advised PC users not to purchase the product in view of its possible use beyond PlayStation 5 .
“You’d be wasting your money, as there’s no guarantee you’ll ever be able to use it on a PC, and there’s a good chance you won’t be able to. The original PSVR is (electronically) equivalent to a monitor, and so it’s relatively easy to get a video signal on it. Reading the sensors etc took a lot of reverse engineering and at least a year from release before anyone figured it out. Then it took another couple of years before it was usable as a VR headset for PC. Tracking and controllers (using the original hardware) are still a work in progress, over 5 years since launch. This is without Sony making any effort to prevent non-PS4 users from using it.”.
The developer has listed some of the technical issues due to which the conversion could become extremely complex and time consuming: “Even if Sony hadn’t encrypted the headset data, it would take a lot of reverse engineering (read several years) just to get an image. Then there’s tracking, which would need to be developed, as there’s no tracker available SLAM out of the box for Windows (assuming of course the camera protocol has been decoded.) Then there would be the controllers etc etc. […] PlayStation VR 2 will not be playable on PC for the foreseeable future, and probably never will be“.
Among the games coming to PSVR2 there are also Gran Turismo 7 and Beat Saber.
