Sony’s PlayStation VR is almost out – it will be launching on October 13 – and with its low entry cost, as well as the lack of a requirement for a high end PC, it seems to be VR’s best bet to break into the mainstream so far. That said, the low cost for the PlayStation VR definitely comes with some concessions and compromises- no one, I hope, expects Sony to deliver for PSVR the kind of VR experience that HTC and Valve do with the Vive for double the cost.
But whatever the compromises made might be, Sony will try to work on them in the future, it sounds like. In an interview with Japanese outlet Gigazine, Masayasu Ito, who is Sony’s head of engineering, expressed a desire to improve the PSVR’s performance and lower its cost over time- possibly with future iterations of the headset?
“I want to aim at both performance enhancement and cost reduction [in the future],” Ito said, adding, “The price of the PS4 has come down, but its performance has not degraded- that kind of flow of lowering costs, improving performance is what we want to aim for with the PlayStation VR.”
It certainly sounds sensible enough- and who knows, with the PlayStation VR 2 or 3, it ay even be possible to deliver the kind of room scale VR experiences that Valve and HTC can do right now with the HTC Vive, albeit for much prohibitively higher prices.