\u00a0I went balls to the wall and booted up Rez: Infinite… This my friends was a gloriously immersive and amazing huge tiny mistake – that I loved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Downsides to this are of course the fact you have yet another box to add to your entertainment unit and, like a magician pulling ribbons from his nose, a never ending mess of cables to deal with.<\/p>\n
The headset is powered on & off by a power button along with volume controls and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack to connect any standard headphones. Sony include a small pair of earbuds in the box with your PSVR that do a decent job and do so because many of your standard over-the-head headphones just wont stretch far enough to accommodate the PSVR\u2019s added bulk.<\/p>\n
Once \u201cjacked-in\u201d everything appears to be kind of the same. Sony have opted to not implement another layer on top of their standard PS4 GUI, the difference being that now the screen floats in front of you and as you look left to right or up and down it kind of hovers there like a digital billboard locked to your head movement.<\/p>\n
Then you boot up a game and shit gets seriously real. I went balls to the wall and booted up Rez: Infinite, one of my favourite games of all time that\u2019s been rebooted to coincide with the launch of PSVR. This my friends was a gloriously immersive and amazing huge tiny mistake that I loved.<\/p>\n
Headset on, cut off from the outside world, you are truly, truly immersed. Rez provides a sci-fi, Tron-like, world that you float through shooting at enemies that when destroyed build upon the games 90\u2019s electronica soundtrack. In VR this world is mesmerising, it\u2019s fleshed out, it feels freaking real despite looking nothing like it and you\u2019re a part of it! How cool is that?!<\/p>\n
PlayStation VR\u2019s best chance at success is ironically the same thing that\u2019s holding it back; and that\u2019s the PS4.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I finished the first level, which took about ten minutes, stopped the game and started to take the headset off, returning to reality. This was probably the most confronting experience. The room felt extra bright, despite being an overcast day, and I felt almost confused? Shocked back to the real world.<\/p>\n
A co-worker who was watching my set it up and play in the office the day it arrived remarked that I looked \u201ca little white\u201d. I didn\u2019t feel nauseous, there were moments throughout the game where I knew I was going that way but it was generally only briefly. Then I stood up. It was like it all hit me at once and I spent the afternoon feeling just that little bit \u201cnot-quite-right\u201d as I recovered.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Motion sickness isn\u2019t something that\u2019s unique to PSVR however. In fact the PSVR\u2019s higher refresh rate can in many cases make it\u00a0better than others. It\u2019s a trope of VR and one that developers on any platform are doing their best to find the best ways of dealing with. My mistake was firing up Rez: Infinite having not gotten my VR sea legs.<\/p>\n
Sony\u2019s VR Worlds is a much better title for dipping your toe into VR and it\u2019s the one I\u2019ve used to demo the headset with ever since. Included is a group of experiences and games that are tailor made to highlight the capabilities of what the headset can do. Some, like \u201cOcean Descent\u201d, are purely observational and allow the player to simply lose themselves in an amazingly immersive experience as it unfolds around them whilst others like \u201cThe London Heist\u201d put you in the middle of a fast paced getaway on a London freeway after robbing a bank. It\u2019s a great mix and one that you can use to grow your familiarity in\u00a0VR space with.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
PlayStation VR\u2019s best chance at success is ironically the same thing that\u2019s holding it back; and that\u2019s the PS4. With over 40 million PS4s out there already it provides PSVR a huge number of living rooms to tap into. Do you have a PS4? Well then you\u2019re PSVR ready, simple as that. The PS4 however is two years old, the Move controllers are six! And that means the tech is out of date and somewhat shows it from time to time but then the headset is nearly half the price of the others too.<\/p>\n
PlayStation also have a long standing, and in many cases exclusive relationships with AAA developers, that will help play a huge role in continuing to get major titles released on their platform. This is something that needs to be consistent to prevent the platform from going the way of Microsoft\u2019s Kinect, 3D TVs and of course the dodo.<\/p>\n
But is it worth it? Yeah, it kind of is. If you\u2019re a PS4 owner wanting to get into VR this is definitely the easiest and cheapest way of doing that. It\u2019s not the best, it doesn\u2019t have room tracking and the titles will always be somewhat limited even with the new PS4 Pro on the horizon. I\u2019m not about to recommend PSVR to someone who plays nothing but FIFA or CoD but for those wanting to explore PSVR is the ultimate living room VR solution available today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sony\u2019s foray into the burgeoning world of virtual reality is one that by all accounts just shouldn\u2019t work.…\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":5234,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2],"tags":[304],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"reckoner_social_message":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5233"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}