PlayStation VR2’s eye tracking and adaptive triggers can now be used on PC, thanks to a mostly open-source mod of Sony’s SteamVR driver.
If you’re unaware, while PS VR2 officially supports PC VR through Sony’s official SteamVR driver, the headset currently lacks its standout features on PC, including eye tracking, HDR, headset rumble, and adaptive triggers.
Now, a team of software developers has released an open-source mod of Sony’s driver, called PlayStation VR2 Toolkit (PSVR2Toolkit), and it includes eye tracking, adaptive triggers for the Sense controllers, and 10-bit color depth support.
10-bit color depth is necessary for one of the two core tenets of HDR, the wider color gamut. The other tenet is the greater range of luminance. But according to the PSVR2Toolkit developers, SteamVR simply does not support PQ, needed for that. Further, even the 10-bit color depth does not work on newer AMD cards, due to an issue on AMD’s side which the developers say is out of their control.
PSVR2Toolkit also improves the Sense controller tracking compared to Sony’s version of the driver, by implementing better prediction.
PlayStation VR2 PC Adapter Review: Bare Minimum OLED
PlayStation VR2’s PC adapter is out today, and we’ve been testing it for the past few days. Here’s what we think of PSVR 2 as a PC VR headset.
The developer of Cactus Cowboy also got the Sense triggers working on PC back in September, but this leveraged and required DSX, a paid tool.
The lead of the PSVR2Toolkit team goes by the handle whatdahopper. The other two developers on the team go by Hyblocker, who worked on the eye tracking, and Supremium, who worked on the adaptive triggers.
whatdahopper also released OculusKiller, three years ago, which makes Quest Link load directly into SteamVR, bypassing Oculus Dash. More recently they’ve been working on ReLinked VR and OculusWRP, tools that help you avoid needing the Meta Quest Link PC software altogether.
You can download PlayStation VR2 Toolkit from GitHub, and you can use its eye tracking in VRChat with the PSVR2Toolkit.VRCFT module, also available on GitHub. The only aspect that isn’t open source is the eye tracking calibration.
At less than $500 ($400 plus the adapter and cables), PlayStation VR2 is now the lowest cost option for eye-tracking on PC we’ve ever seen.
However, PSVR2Toolkit’s eye tracking currently isn’t routed to OpenXR, so can’t be used for eye-tracked foveated rendering in titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and DCS. But OpenXR support is planned for a future release. The team also plans to add support for the precision haptics of the Sense controllers.
