Sony's PSVR2 headset works on PC but it requires additional hardware

Since Sony announced its PlayStation 5 VR successor, the wider VR community has wondered if the VR headset is PC compatible, officially or unofficially. And it's not hard to see why; it features some truly impressive specs alongside an affordable price point. For USD 549, you get a 4K OLED display with a per-eye resolution of 2000 x 2040 pixels with up to 120 Hz support. Not to mention a wide field-of-view (FOV) of 110 degrees.

3

Connecting a PSVR 2 headset to PC would be pretty sweet, image credit: Sony.

These are tasty VR headset specs no matter how you slice it, and on top of this, you've got full motion controls and inside-out tracking for room-space VR - features not present in the original PSVR hardware.

There's good news and not-so-good news when it comes to connecting a PSVR 2 headset to your PC and firing up Half-Life: Alyx on Steam - yes, the headset works. But it requires the use of special hardware that hasn't even been invented yet.

As per the same team at iVRy that cracked PSVR 2 hardware authentication, it took to Twitter to announce due to the headset blocking DSC, "everyone will need an adapter (apart from some AMD users on Linux). That adapter doesn't exist yet. We have to design and build one, then hopefully, some hardware company will pick it up and mass-produce it."

And it doesn't look to be a case of Sony actively blocking this functionality on the PSVR 2, it simply hasn't added the necessary hardware support. Basically, when a PC's DisplayPort interface tries to talk to the PSVR 2 to try and get information about capabilities, setup, and other things, none of that is available due to the headset simply being a PSVR 2 display.

3

All people really want is to play Half-Life: Alux on the 4K OLED display of the PSVR 2, image credit: Valve.

"We need to put a (hardware) man in the middle that mediates between the PC and the PSVR2 and gives the PC display driver the information in the same way it would if the PSVR2 was not relying on a DisplayPort source with hard-coded parameters," writes iVRy.

The development group still plans to pursue the hardware route, as its iVRy Driver for SteamVR is an application designed to use "iPhone, Android, GearVR, Oculus Mobile or a Sony PSVR headset as a Virtual Reality Headset for your PC." And it would love to add PVSR 2 into the mix.

On the plus side, it looks like the team got Half-Life: Alyx running on the PSVR 2 - though it had to jump through several hoops, including running Windows SteamVR on GeForce GPU sending output via HDMI to a Linux box which is connected to PSVR2 via an AMD GPU. "We didn't magically solve complex hardware issues that require us to design and build custom circuitry," iVRy wrote about its sticky-tape approach.