Sony has made a breakthrough in VR technology. Showcased for Sony's Technology Day in a brand new video from the company's R&D Center is a 4K OLED lens that doubles the pixel resolution of current VR headsets like the HTC Vive and HP Reverb G2.
"To collaborate and share experiences remotely, high-resolution technologies for realistic images and low latency systems for seamless video are necessary,” Sony notes in the video. "The VR head-mounted display for demonstration can project a realistic high definition 3D space without pixelation."
Each lens held in the prototype device displays in 4000x2040 (4K), for a total of 8K in both eyes. This is just a prototype so the visor has to be manually held to the user's face, but a real device would be held in place using an actual headset.
And it's not just a lens, either. Sony has created a new type of latency compensation technology that reduces latency to less than 0.01 seconds. This is done by "combining multiple sensor data and latency compensation technologies," although Sony doesn't dive too deep into the details.
The applications here for VR are obvious, from more realistic virtual concerts to games at even higher resolutions than most high-end gaming PCs can even display. Rendering two 4K images simultaneously would be taxing for any system, and it seems unlikely that this technology would be usable in the current PS5. The PlayStation 6, on the other hand, might have the power for 8K gaming, but we're likely many years away from the next console generation's arrival.
And who knows? Maybe by the time we get a PlayStation 6 and a PSVR 2, we'll also have the same sort of brain-scanning technology that lets players cast spells using only their thoughts in this Skyrim VR mod. The future is looking pretty wild.