Data

PSVR 2 Discount More Than Doubled Usual Sales Volume, But Quest Still Leads

August 8, 2024 From roadtovr

PSVR 2 got its first big sale the other week which resulted in a large lift in sales volume for the headset in the US.

At $550 MSRP, PSVR 2 is actually more expensive than the PS5 console that powers it, at $500. That’s made it a tough sell for some, especially with Quest 3, its nearest competitor, priced at $500 and not requiring a tethered console.

Demand for Sony’s VR headset may be greater than it appears however, with many seemingly willing to buy once the price is right.

Sony discovered this after its first big sale on PSVR 2 the other week, which dropped the price of the headset alone to $350 (37% discount), and the price of the Horizon bundle to $400 (a 33% discount).

In just the week or so that the sale was active, we can see that sales volume for headset more than doubled on Amazon US compared to the prior months.

PSVR 2’s short-lived Summer sale may tell us something about the forthcoming holiday period, the time of year when the most VR headsets are sold and the biggest sales are generally seen. Sony now has a clear idea of how much its headset sales could ramp up if it offers the same deal during the holiday, or perhaps an even better one.

While the discount appears to have resulted in a nice boost in unit sales for PSVR 2, to put things into perspective we can see that it’s still a far cry from the number of Quest 2 and Quest 3 units Meta has been selling.

Vision Pro and Quest 3 Hand-tracking Latency Compared

March 28, 2024 From roadtovr

Vision Pro is built entirely around hand-tracking while Quest 3 uses controllers first and foremost, but also supports hand-tracking as an alternate option for some content. But which has better hand-tracking? You might be surprised at the answer.

Vision Pro Hand-tracking Latency

With no support for motion controllers, Vision Pro’s only motion-based input is hand-tracking. The core input system combines hands with eyes to control the entire interface.

Prior to the launch of the headset we spotted some footage that allowed us to gauge the hand-tracking latency between 100-200ms, but that’s a pretty big window. Now we’ve run our own test and more precisely find Vision Pro’s hand-tracking to be about 128ms on visionOS beta v1.1.1.

Here’s how we measured it. Using a screen capture from the headset which views both the passthrough hand and the virtual hand, we can see how many frames it takes between when the passthrough hand moves and when the virtual hand moves. We used Apple’s Persona system for hand rendering to eliminate any additional latency which could be introduced by Unity.

After sampling a handful of tests (pun intended), we found this to be about 3.5 frames. At the capture rate of 30 FPS, that’s 116.7ms. Then we add to that Vision Pro’s known passthrough latency of about 11ms, for the final result of 127.7ms of photon to hand-tracking latency.

We also tested how long between a passthrough tap and a virtual input (to see if full skeletal hand-tracking is slower than simple tap detection), but we didn’t find any significant difference in latency. We also tested in different lighting conditions and found no significant difference.

Quest 3 Hand-tracking Latency

How does that compare to Quest 3, a headset which isn’t solely controlled by the hands? Using a similar test, we found Quest 3’s hand-tracking latency to be around 70ms on Quest OS v63. That’s a substantial improvement over Vision Pro, but actual usage of the headset would make one think Quest 3 has even lower hand-tracking latency. But it turns out some of the perceived latency is masked.

Here’s how we found out. Using a 240Hz through-the-lens capture, we did the same kind of motion test as we did with Vision Pro to find out how long between the motion of the passthrough hand and the virtual hand. That came out to 31.3ms. Combined with Quest 3’s known passthrough latency of about 39ms that makes Quest 3’s photon to hand-tracking latency about 70.3ms.

When using Quest 3, hand-tracking feels even snappier than that result suggests, so what gives?

Because Quest 3’s passthrough latency is about three-and-a-half times that of Vision Pro (11ms vs. 39ms), the time between seeing your hand move and your virtual hand move appears to be just 31.3ms (compared to 116.7ms on Vision Pro).

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An important point here: latency and accuracy of hand-tracking are two different things. In many cases, they may even have an inverse relationship. If you optimize your hand-tracking algorithm for speed, you may give up some accuracy. And if you optimize it for accuracy, you may give up some speed. As of now we don’t have a good measure of hand-tracking accuracy for either headset, outside of a gut feeling.

Quest 2 Stock Appears to be Draining as Holiday Sale Drives Purchases

December 12, 2023 From roadtovr

Although Quest 3 is Meta’s hot new headset release, an attractive holiday deal looks like it’ll make Quest 2 the company’s best selling headset this year. Looking at the stock available directly from Meta shows that Quest 3 availability is holding strong while the 256GB variant of Quest 2 is largely out of stock.

While it’s possible that Quest 2 (256GB) is simply under heavy demand, other data we’ve gathered points to the 128GB model being the more popular seller so far. This likely means that Meta didn’t have as much stock of the 256GB model to begin with, or perhaps just not enough to keep up.

While Meta says it will support Quest 2 for years to come, it’s unclear how long the company plans to continue manufacturing the device. Given the demand we’ve seen this holiday at the starting price point of $250, perhaps the company will reconsider its timeline.

Meanwhile, Quest 3 appears to be available in abundance. However, data suggests that Quest 2 is significantly outselling the new and more expensive headset.