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PSVR2 hardware authentication has been cracked on PC
- Mindwipe 4y agoMy understanding is that this wasn't particularly the issue, the main problem for PC use is that you'd need a VirtualLink adaptor, and that will hold back people doing much work on this.
- scheeseman486 4y agoVirtualLink isn't that exotic, just another USB-C Alt mode that has 4xDP lanes with USB3 signaling pushed over the USB2 pins. There's likely plenty of ICs on the market that could do it, just few products that implement the feature because there's zero demand. Given someone gets the PSVR2 working on PC there would be incentive among enthusiasts to create hobbyist-grade hardware at least.
- Nursie 4y agoApparently the radeon RX6xxx series has them, and nvidia 2xxx cards with USB-C ports. Though yes, it seems unlikely there will be continued support.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoYeah, GPU manufacturers seem to have given up on supporting VR headsets.
- jsheard 4y agoThere's nothing to support, the VirtualLink consortium was dissolved and it's now a zombie standard with nobody at the wheel. The VR headset makers that originally backed it aren't supporting it anymore either, Valve announced and then cancelled a VirtualLink cable for the Index, and HTC/Oculus/Microsoft never made it as far as announcing any products.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoAh, damn, I had no idea
- wolrah 4y agoFor anyone interested in why VirtualLink didn't go anywhere, one of the limiting factors was that USB 3 and above is entirely separate from USB 2 and below. Normal USB-C DP Alt Mode delivers either four lanes of DP and USB 2 or two lanes of DP and both varieties of USB. VirtualLink takes the 4xDP variant and upgrades the USB pairs to support 3.x modes, but that means if you plugged a USB 2 device in to the headset itself there'd be nowhere to route that traffic. A chip was developed to bridge the gap and allow USB 2 devices to connect to the USB 3 bus, but there were quirks and it ended up not being ready in time to be useful to the VR market. Valve eventually cancelled their adapter plans and that was the end of it. This Hackaday article has a lot of useful links including an open source breakout board design for the chip in question: https://hackaday.com/2022/03/07/a-chip-to-address-the-fundamental-usb-3-0-deficiency/ https://hackaday.com/2022/03/07/a-chip-to-address-the-fundam...
- jsheard 4y agoI suspect the rise of good-enough wireless PCVR over commodity WiFi hardware didn't help matters either - being able to tether a headset over a single USB-C cable is mildly convenient but nowhere near as convenient as having no cable at all. Oculus and Pico both went down that route and it looks like Valve are also going to with their next headset.
- snvzz 4y ago>nowhere near as convenient as having no cable at all. AIUI the tech just isn't there for this. There's latency and packet loss to deal with, whenever there's a radio in the path.
- jsheard 4y agoThe tech has been there for years, if you look at discussions of using the Quest for PCVR the default recommendation is to use WiFi streaming rather than the tethered USB mode. The trick is that the reprojection still runs on the headset itself so the critical part for avoiding motion sickness has minimal latency regardless of the signal quality.
- pjmlp 4y agoThe first time I saw someone using a VR headset was in 1994, the technology might have improved, but the adoption issues hardly changed.
- MikusR 4y agoThere are more propper vr headsets sold than Xbox series consoles.
- pjmlp 4y agoThat still doesn't make VR a success at scale. How many of them are actually being used and not stored in some closet?
- mrtranscendence 4y agoIt might not make VR a success per se, but objectively there are more VR headsets per capita sold today than 1984.
- pjmlp 4y agoSure, if we ignore that after all these decades it is as much of a success as 3D TVs.
- jsheard 4y agoThat and the fact that the PSVR2 uses camera-based SLAM tracking, similar to the Oculus Quest, and reimplementing that from scratch is non-trivial to say the least.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoIsn't the SLAM tracking processing done on the headset itself and then the computed movement data sent to the PC/PS5 via USB?
- jsheard 4y agoIs it? I haven't seen it definitively confirmed either way, but intuitively it would make more sense to do SLAM on the PS5s main processor rather than driving up the PSVR2s BOM with an on-board processor fast enough to do it. They have to stream the camera frames back to the PS5 anyway for the passthrough feature to work.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago>driving up the PSVR2s BOM with an on-board processor fast enough to do it The Quest 2 can do SLAM on the head set plus the 2*2K resolution 3D rendering in real time on a 4 year old QUALCOMM chip running Android OS on top and it costs less than the PSVR2. So Sony can definitely afford to put a processor in the headset just for the SLAM compute alone since the 3D rendering is done on the PS5. The chip in any optical mouse is a low resolution camera and DSP computing SLAM algos at hundreds of times a second and costs peanuts. VR headsets have more resolution to process and account for the third dimension in space but they also don't have to process the entire picture but just the differential movement of the LEDs captured in their blanking intervals, processed as white dots in B/W images, further simplifying things. So pretty sure the PSVR2 SLAM compute can be done on an ARM chip or FPGA worth ~ 10 USD nowadays.
- makomk 4y agoThere's already a mostly-working open source SLAM implementation that people have been using on a few of the existing headsets. What complicates matters here is that at least feature extraction seems to run on the PSVR2 headset itself so the existing code can't just be dropped in as-is. (Also, whilst the controllers work in basically the same way as many other VR controllers using a constellation of IR LEDs, there's not really good open source support for any of those controllers either.)
- makomk 4y agoThe PSVR2 turned out not to actually use VirtualLink, just more-or-less standard DisplayPort + USB 3 + USB PD over USB-C. Most of the compatibility issues seem to be from it requiring parts of the spec that aren't widely implemented at the same time, like 12V support and display compression. The main open question is how to actually switch it into VR mode so that it's possible to send a stereo image instead of 2D virtual cinema mode, and I don't think anyone is quite sure whether this helps with that at the moment.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> USB PD USB Power Delivery (USB PD) In case anybody else also wasn't familiar
- fabian2k 4y agoIsn't one of the major barriers that you'd have to reimplement the entire tracking code for PC? Or does that actually run on the headset independently and not on the PS5?
- papercrane 4y agoI'm pretty sure that runs on the headset. If you plug a headset into a VirtualLink adapter it will go into the "cinematic mode" and function as a floating 1080p monitor with 3dof tracking done by the headset. https://twitter.com/Thrilluwu/status/1635374573368778752?s=20 https://twitter.com/Thrilluwu/status/1635374573368778752?s=2...
- jayd16 4y agoThe difference between the headset doing 3dof by default (expected for something like time warp and only need accelerometers) and getting an API that parses the camera feed for 6dof head and controller tracking and wiring that up to OpenXR seems like a huge leap.
- edandersen 4y agoOne of the more interesting parts of the PSVR2 is that it proves that the PS5 is the only console that can output two different video streams independently (HDMI and the front USB-C port). PSVR1 did some passthrough hack. Imagine the possibilities if Microsoft had actually added multiple HDMI ports on the Xbox Series X: - screen mirroring for capture cards without passthrough - native single console multiscreen cockpit view modes for Forza - Split screen Halo/Goldeneye without actually splitting the screen - LAN party with one console - minimaps, HUDS on separate screens like the Wii U - Discord / chat on a seperate screen while streaming - support for the ecosystem of actually sometimes quite high quality Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets I wonder if they could technically add more video out ports via the PCI-E based expansion card slot...
- klohto 4y agoImagine they did and now you have to pay $50 extra to never use one of these niche and gimmicky possibilities
- zirgs 4y agoPretty much all PCs support multiple video outputs. It's not a gimmick at all.
- josephg 4y agoTrue - but I can't think of a single game which actually makes use of multiple monitors even on PC where plenty of people have the hardware to support that sort of thing. A second monitor with Discord on it, or for streaming? Sure. But nothing that video games themselves make use of. Even if games supported it, who has multiple TVs in their lounge room close enough to connect both of them to your xbox? That sounds super niche.
- ok_dad 4y agoSimracers use triples quite often! Alignment is a pain.
- ganoushoreilly 4y agoSadly the lead dev has stepped away from this. https://twitter.com/iVRy_VR/status/1655554037650006017?s=20 https://twitter.com/iVRy_VR/status/1655554037650006017?s=20
- mikelovenotwar 4y agoNo wonder: https://twitter.com/iVRy_VR/status/1655543048787378176 https://twitter.com/iVRy_VR/status/1655543048787378176
- xeromal 4y agoI struggle to follow these threads. I have no idea what's going on.
- ganoushoreilly 4y agoI think it's part stress of the project and part stress of the spotlight. I would imagine the developer was stressing over how to manage requesting donations and then all the feedback (good and bad) that they were receiving.
- xeromal 4y agoYeah, I went straight to their profile and found a thread that made sense. Even if they wanted a little money, the thankless work of being a hacker/dev/whatever on a highly anticipated project sucks and drove this guy to take a break. Good on him.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoI could see how he was getting tired of annoying people, but then I managed to navigate to the author's profile, and there's a pinned tweet where he's selling this thing as a product for $20 > Use your Sony #PSVR, Oculus, Pico or Daydream Headset, or Smartphone as a #SteamVR #VR Headset for your PC. Evaluate for free, use In-App Purchase or Steam DLC for "Premium Edition" If he doesn't want to deal with customers, maybe he shouldn't be selling this as a product That said, there's nothing wrong with discontinuing the product if he doesn't feel like working on it any more