PlayStation VR

~ the eulogy ~

Sony shipped five million of these and the number is still hard to place. It is more than any rival headset of the period moved, and it is almost nothing beside a console that sold past a hundred million. PlayStation VR went on sale on 13 October 2016 at 399 dollars, roughly half what the PC headsets cost that year, and it worked by asking less of the hardware than they did.

What it asked for instead was floor space. The headset needed the PlayStation Camera, sold separately, plus a processor box that sat between the console and the television doing the video split. Setting it up meant running cable across a room and then finding somewhere to hide a second black rectangle. Everyone who owned one has a version of the same complaint, and none of it stopped the thing working.

The games carried it further than the specifications did. Resident Evil 7 shipped its entire campaign playable inside the headset, which no other publisher was willing to do at that scale. Astro Bot Rescue Mission is still the argument people reach for when they want to say the platform produced something that could not have existed on a flat screen.

Sony never held a funeral. PlayStation VR2 arrived on 22 February 2023 without backward compatibility for the old library, which was the actual message, and the original headset carried on working for anyone who still had a PS4 plugged in. The dated end is smaller and more bureaucratic than that. The free adapter that made the old headset speak to a PS5 stopped being issued on 26 November 2024.

~ the dossier ~

~ the box on the floor ~

The processor unit is the part that dates it hardest. It existed because the PS4 could not do the video split and the reprojection work on its own, so Sony put a small computer in the middle of the chain and shipped it in the box. It also drove the social screen, the mirrored feed that let people in the room watch what the person in the headset was seeing, which turned out to be most of how the thing was actually used.

Tracking was done by watching colored lights. The camera looked for the nine LEDs on the headset and the glowing ball on each Move controller, which is the same trick the Move had been doing since 2010 with a webcam and a wand. It worked in a lit living room and fell apart if someone walked between you and the lens. Sony was reusing a peripheral nobody had wanted the first time, and that reuse is a large part of why the price could be 399 dollars.

~ what five million means ~

Five million units by the end of 2019 was enough to make PlayStation VR the volume leader and not enough to make virtual reality a normal thing people owned. The headsets that came after went the other direction, standalone and with nothing else in the room. Oculus Quest shipped the same year Sony's counter stopped being updated, and it removed every cable that PlayStation VR had asked you to accept.

I never had one. The pricing that made it a bargain in dollars did not survive the trip to Turkey, where a 399 dollar peripheral for a console you already paid import duty on sits in a different bracket entirely, and the people I knew with a PS4 were buying games with that money. My own work with cameras and depth in those years was on drones and industrial rigs, where the goal was that nobody has to wear anything at all.

~ the quiet part ~

Sony has still not published a discontinuation notice for the original headset. The clearest thing in the record is the adapter: a free part, available only by request, that existed for one purpose, and whose availability ended on 26 November 2024.

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