Now, speaking to the official PLAY magazine, Polyarc Principal Engineer Brendan Walker talked excitedly about the PS VR2 controllers - the very first thing unveiled by Sony about the new Virtual Reality hardware. Walker, who worked on Moss and the recently released Moss: Book II, also praised Sony’s decision to add foveated rendering and eye tracking to PS VR2 as it will greatly benefit the system’s performance. We’ve had to design a game that works single-handedly with the DualShock 4 or dual-handedly with the PlayStation Move. So now we have two proper hands and what can you do with that? Their design for the tracking ring was super-interesting. You’ll notice that it’s more toward the back of the hand, and one cool implication of that is that it means it’s easier if you need to have two-handed interactions that are closer to each other. You can do that, because the tracking rings aren’t going to bump into each other. So, that’s pretty cool! You can get higher-precision interactions. Indeed, during the GDC 2022 panel ‘Building next-gen games for PlayStation VR2 with Unity’, Unity Senior XR Graphics Developer Fabien Houlmann stated that the combined use of foveated rendering and eye tracking can deliver up to 3.6x frame time improvements while keeping equivalent graphics quality. It was smart of Sony to lean into this on a console because, you know, you have this hardware that hopefully is going to be around for quite a while. And in order to eke out as much lifetime out of it, you need to be able to optimise where you can and this is another axis of optimisation. You can check out the whole panel via the embed below. PS VR2 doesn’t have a release date yet, but that might change soon given the amount of information that’s been shared lately.
