It Should Be Easier to Port Games on PlayStation VR2

During CEDEC (Computer Entertainment Developers Conference) 2022, Sony revealed that PlayStation VR2 should make porting games on the headset easier as PS VR2 game development uses the same SDK used to develop PS5 games.

The headset's production environment supports games created in Unity and Unreal Engine, so it's supposed to be simpler for games to support PS VR2, with a standard controller interface and button placement similar to other VR platforms.

SIE's Yasuo Takahashi and Kenjo Akiyama also talked about the headset's GPU's Flexible Scale Rasterization (FSR), which combines PS VR2's tracking cameras and foveated rendering to alter pixel density based on where the player is looking, which will further optimize rendering.

The development environment offers sample programs for PS VR2's force feedback: the headset vibrates according to what the player sees or hears, allowing developers to test out sample vibrations based on gunshots, footsteps, jumps, and more.

One tool introduced during the conference was VR Trace, which allows diagnosing issues with the applications through capture and replay. It can automatically detect and highlight problems and even replace eye and tracking results with dummy data to make game development possible without a connected VR headset.

PlayStation VR2 Comfort Sample, another development environment tool, lets game makers learn about the problems in implementation that can occur when developing VR games, like an in-game horizon not matching the real world's or comfort issues created by an incorrect FOV. It has quizzes that allow developers to learn about these bugs in a fun way: from a quiz where you need to identify problems occurring on a screen to the one where you need to identify what bugs are causing a problem.

Seems like even though we already know quite a lot about PlayStation VR2, there's still more to learn. The headset is going to be released in early 2023 and will have over 20 major titles at launch, including Horizon Call of the Mountain and Resident Evil Village, with the latter playable at Tokyo Game Show next month, where the headset will be available to use for the first time.

Learn more about what PlayStation VR2 can offer for developers here and don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.