Sony Exec: Oculus Rift is better PlayStation VR and more

VR is nearly upon us, and there are three major competitors all shaping up to take over our eyeballs. We’ve got HTC HTCCY +% Vive on the high end — not cheap, not simple, but offering a degree of tracking neither of its competitors can match. We’ve got Facebook's FB +1.95% Oculus Rift in the middle, currently dominating in terms of mindshare but still requiring a sizeable investment and a beefy computer to make things work. And then we’ve got Playstation VR, by far the most accessible of the three. While we don’t yet have a price on that one, the big difference is that it runs off the $350 PS4 rather than a $1000+ computer, and there are already a whole lot of PS4s out there. It might be a little less powerful on the hardware side, however, as Sony Computer Entertainment Masayasu Ito said in an interview with Polygon:

“If you just talk about the high-end quality, yes, I would admit that Oculus may have better VR,” Ito told Polygon. “However, it requires a very expensive and very fast PC. The biggest advantage for Sony is our headset works with PS4. It’s more for everyday use, so it has to be easy to use and it has to be affordable. This is not for the person who uses a high-end PC. It’s for the mass market.”

It’s surprisingly candid, but it’s fair. Still, I don’t think it’s going to be such a problem for PSVR. I’ve used both headsets, and I can’t say I’ve noticed a significant difference between demos. It isn’t that there isn’t a difference — I’m sure there is — more that my experience of all the VR demos I’ve seen so far has been so software driven that it’s hard to draw too many distinctions based on hardware. Yes, the Oculus Rift will run on better machines, and it will do so with better onboard hardware. But I’ve had some great experiences with Samsung’s Gear VR too, and that things runs off a phone. The key is that nobody has a great idea of just what sort of experiences work best on VR just yet, and so when something seems to click it makes a big impression no matter what hardware it’s running. That search for great content is what’s going to define the first year of VR more than tech specs.

In that regard, both Playstation VR and Oculus Rift have their advantages. Playsation Vr is likely to start out with a bigger install base, and Sony’s stable of first-party developers is sure to be a boon. Oculus Rift is an open platform, however, and that’s a good way to get a huge number of developers playing around to see what works. Vive is a bit of a wild card due to its high price, but the body tracking might make for some cool stuff as well.