No Blu-Ray 3D support planned for Playstation VR 2
Sony's gaming hardware chief Yasuo Takahashi confirmed in an interview that there are no plans for Blu-ray 3D support on Playstation VR 2.
The first Playstation VR supported Blu-Ray. Less than half a year after its launch, Sony rolled out a software update that turned the VR headset into a 3D TV and enabled 3D movies in "cinema mode." This was a popular feature. 3D movies usually look even more impressive in virtual reality than they do with 3D glasses in the theater.
The Playstation VR 2 (review) will not get the feature. At least, not soon. In an interview with the Japanese website AVWatch, Yasuo Takahashi confirms that Sony currently has no plans to support Blu-Ray 3D. Takahashi is the hardware head of Sony's gaming division SIE and is responsible for its global product strategy. He also led the development of the Playstation VR 2.
YouTube and VR apps could feel the absence
That this feature is missing is no surprise. The company dropped Blu-Ray 3D support for Playstation 5 in 2020, which was required for Playstation VR 2 to be able to play and display the media format.
Takahashi does not give specific reasons for the lack of Blu-Ray 3D support. However, the company probably made a cost-benefit analysis based on usage data and decided against supporting the format. Playstation VR 2 also has a cinema mode like its predecessor, but Sony apparently does not believe that Blu-Ray 3D could become an important growth driver for the system.
Does this mean the end of 3D movies on Playstation VR 2? Not necessarily. The website asked Takahashi if he could imagine the distribution of relevant content coming from elsewhere, such as YouTube. Takahashi replied that "it is possible to develop such an app."
Details on the creation of the Playstation VR 2
The article, which is quite long at over 2,500 words, goes into detail about the development of the Playstation VR 2 and the team's design decisions and is worth reading for those interested in the system's technology. It is just a pity that the machine translation from Japanese sounds patchy and bumpy in parts.
The following is a list of interesting points:
- The development of Playstation VR 2 began the same year that PSVR 1 appeared - before Sony could foresee how well the headsets would sell.
- The OLED display supports 10-bit color depth as opposed to PSVR 1's 8-bit. The dynamic range of brightness is double that of PSVR 1.
- Sony chose Fresnel lenses because they allow a larger field of view than the aspherical lenses of the PSVR 1 without being thicker and heavier. The team decided against modern pancake lenses because they absorb a lot of light.
- Future-proofing the Playstation VR 2 was one of the reasons Sony decided to implement eye-tracking. It would be hard to imagine the PSVR 2 not supporting eye-tracking in five years, Takahashi says.
- Sony examined in detail how the passthrough mode should be implemented technically and considered passthrough using two color cameras in the middle.
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