Years ago, when I wrote about the first wave of VR headsets, a well-meaning reader outlined all of the things I might do to alleviate my discomfort, including taking travel sickness pills, building up my tolerance with incrementally longer sessions and blowing a fan in my face. Studies have also found that it affects women more than men, partly because, as this researcher suggests, VR headsets were designed by and for men. Although this isn’t a problem that affects everyone, it affects enough people ( between 40% and 70%) to make VR a tricky proposition as a mainstream technology. I suffer from motion sickness – if I look at my phone in the car I risk throwing up. After about 20 minutes, sensory overwhelm kicks in and I get a headache and feel nauseous. I don’t like being unable to see what’s happening around me when I’m playing a game, because I have two small children and a cat, and in the 10 minutes I spend playing Gran Turismo in VR, the entire house could be collapsing around me.Īlso – and six-plus years of using VR headsets has not changed this – it makes me feel sick. The thing is, no matter how good a VR thing is, I just don’t want to play in VR. Have you not heard that we’re in a cost of living crisis, Sony? I’m having fun with PSVR2, but I wouldn’t buy one – it has done nothing to change my feeling that this is a niche technology for wealthy nerds. Its flagship launch game, Horizon Call of the Mountain, is £60. Speaking of money, the PSVR2 costs more than the PlayStation 5 that you need to play it: £529.99. Most of the ones that PlayStation VR 2 is launching with have been out for years – and you can’t play your old PSVR games on the new headset. Over the years, very few VR games have been worth playing. (If I were using my Meta Quest 2 headset, I wouldn’t need any cables at all.) The convenience of home VR is finally where it needs to be.īut in other ways VR is exactly where it was in 2016. I was straight into a game 10 minutes after taking the thing out of the box. It’s got 3D audio with built-in earbuds, and eye-tracking so that you can select things in menus by looking at them. The motion controllers look nice and work well. It plugs right into the PlayStation 5, without a power brick or extra cables or a camera. The headset is lightweight, attractively futuristic, fits well and is tethered by only one, relatively unobtrusive cable. In some ways, gaming VR is a world away from where it was in 2016. I’ve been playing around with PlayStation VR 2 this week, and it’s been so long since I played VR games that the novelty is kinda back. But then PSVR went back in my Bottomless Drawer of Video Game Peripherals, and I never felt the urge to get it out again. I played Moss, a charming storybook-style adventure about a mouse.
I was obsessed with Tetris Effect, which is a transcendental experience in VR, and its music-game cousin Rez. The original PlayStation VR headset was the least technically powerful of that first wave of home VR tech, and also the least annoying to use. Cool, sure, but the future of gaming? Nah. And having already played with VR several times at trade shows, the novelty was wearing off fast. They were expensive, as were the PCs that you needed to run them. They needed too many cables and so much space to operate that you had to dedicate a small room to them (which some of my more techy friends happily did). But the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were just so unwieldy. I was totally sold on VR, having had my mind blown playing a space dogfighting sim the previous year at internet-spaceship convention Eve Fanfest. I n 2016, when the first wave of virtual reality headsets hit the market after years of hype, I was sceptical.
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