Sony

Sony
Information
Type	Public (Sony Group Corporation)
Industry	Consumer electronics, gaming, image sensors, displays
Founded	1946 (Tokyo, Japan)
Headquarters	Minato, Tokyo, Japan
Products	PlayStation VR, PlayStation VR2, HMZ Personal 3D Viewer, Spatial Reality Display, SRH-S1, Micro-OLED microdisplays

Sony is a Japanese technology company whose VR, AR, and XR work spans three fairly separate tracks: consumer headsets for its PlayStation consoles, professional and industrial display hardware, and the component business that supplies microdisplays to other headset makers. This article covers Sony's virtual reality and augmented reality products specifically, not the company's wider electronics, music, or film operations. The relevant pieces are made by different parts of the group: Sony Interactive Entertainment builds the PlayStation headsets, Sony Electronics and Sony Corporation handle the head-mounted viewers and the desktop 3D displays, and Sony Semiconductor Solutions makes the OLED microdisplay panels that turn up inside competing devices.

The thread running through all of it is display technology. Sony shipped one of the first consumer OLED head-mounted displays in 2011, used OLED again in both PlayStation VR headsets, and by 2024 was the sole supplier of the micro-OLED panels inside the Apple Vision Pro. The PlayStation line is the part most people know, but it is a small slice of what Sony actually does in this space.

PlayStation VR (2016)

PlayStation VR, shortened to PSVR, was Sony Interactive Entertainment's first virtual reality headset. It launched globally on October 13, 2016 at 44,980 yen, 399 US dollars, 399 euros, and 349 pounds. The headset was designed for the PlayStation 4. It uses a single 5.7 inch OLED panel split between the two eyes, giving 960 by 1080 pixels per eye, a roughly 100 degree field of view, and refresh rates of 90 Hz or 120 Hz.

Position tracking depended on the separate PlayStation Camera, which watched the lights on the headset and the Move motion controllers. The 399 dollar headset price did not include that camera, so the practical cost of getting started was higher. PSVR was forward compatible with the PlayStation 5 through an adapter that Sony shipped free to existing owners. Sony reported 5 million units sold worldwide as of December 31, 2019.

PlayStation VR2 (2023)

PlayStation VR2, or PSVR2, is the successor and a much larger jump in hardware. It launched on February 22, 2023 at 549.99 US dollars and was built for the PlayStation 5. Each eye gets its own OLED panel at 2,000 by 2,040 pixels, with HDR support, a field of view of about 110 degrees, and 90 Hz or 120 Hz refresh.

PSVR2 is the first Sony headset with eye tracking. Two inward-facing infrared cameras follow the player's gaze, which feeds foveated rendering: the system renders at full resolution only where the eyes are pointed and drops detail in the periphery to save performance. The headset also has a built-in motor for subtle vibration effects, used for things like feeling a heartbeat or objects rushing past. Tracking moved inside the headset itself, so the external camera the original needed is gone. Input comes from the Sense controllers, which carry the same haptic feedback and adaptive trigger ideas as the DualSense pad and can sense the approximate position of the player's fingers.

PSVR2 started as a PlayStation 5 only device. Sony later released the PlayStation VR2 PC adapter on August 7, 2024, which lets the headset connect to a PC and play VR games on Steam. The PC route drops some features, including eye tracking and HDR, so it is not a full substitute for using the headset on a PS5.

HMZ Personal 3D Viewer

Years before PlayStation VR, Sony Corporation built a line of head-mounted displays aimed at private movie and game watching rather than positional VR. The first was the HMZ-T1, announced in August 2011 and sold in Japan from November 2011 at around 780 to 799 US dollars. Marketed as the Personal 3D Viewer, it used two 0.7 inch OLED panels at 1,280 by 720 per eye to simulate the experience of a 750 inch screen viewed from about 20 meters away. The visor weighed 420 grams and connected to a separate processor box with an HDMI input and simulated surround sound.

Two more generations followed. The HMZ-T2 arrived in 2012, and the HMZ-T3 and its wireless variant the HMZ-T3W came in 2013; the T3W could run on battery and stream video over WirelessHD instead of a cable. These viewers had no head tracking and were not VR in the modern sense; they were personal cinemas. The line did not continue past the HMZ-T3 generation, but it established Sony's habit of putting small OLED panels close to the eyes, which the PlayStation headsets and the later microdisplay business both built on.

Spatial Reality Display

The Spatial Reality Display is a different idea entirely: a glasses-free 3D desktop monitor, not a near-eye headset. The first model, the ELF-SR1, was announced on October 15, 2020 with a suggested price of 4,999.99 US dollars. It is a 15.6 inch 4K LCD panel (3,840 by 2,160) tilted on its stand, paired with a high-speed vision sensor that tracks the viewer's eyes in three axes, including depth, down to the millisecond. Sony calls the underlying method Eye-Sensing Light Field Display technology. Because the panel renders a separate image for each eye based on where the viewer is looking, a single person sees stereoscopic 3D without any glasses or headset.

The second model, the ELF-SR2, was announced in April 2023 and planned for May 2023 in the United States and Canada at a 5,000 dollar MSRP. It is a larger 27 inch 4K version of the same concept, with an upgraded sensor and broader software support: where the SR1 mainly worked with Unity and Unreal Engine, the SR2 also handles OpenGL and DirectX 11 and 12. Both are sold through Sony's professional channels and aimed at designers and engineers who want to inspect 3D models without putting on hardware.

SRH-S1 and the XYN brand

At CES 2025, on January 7, 2025, Sony introduced a professional XR head-mounted display, the SRH-S1, under a new spatial content brand called XYN. This is enterprise hardware, not a games headset. It uses Sony's 1.3 type OLED Micro-OLED microdisplays at 4K resolution per eye and ships with two controllers, a ring and a pointer, designed for handling and pointing at 3D objects.

The SRH-S1 was developed with Siemens Digital Industries Software and is the display for Siemens' NX Immersive Designer and NX Immersive Collaborator engineering tools, part of the two companies' push into what they call the industrial metaverse. Siemens listed the headset and controllers at 4,750 US dollars, available to preorder ahead of CES with shipping expected to begin in February 2025. The SRH-S1 is a separate product from both the consumer PlayStation headsets and the desktop Spatial Reality Displays, and it sits in Sony's professional creation lineup rather than its gaming one.

Sony Semiconductor Solutions as a microdisplay supplier

Beyond its own branded hardware, Sony is a major supplier of the displays inside other companies' headsets. Sony Semiconductor Solutions makes micro-OLED panels, also called OLED-on-silicon or OLEDoS, where the OLED material is deposited directly onto a silicon backplane to pack very high pixel density into a tiny panel.

The most prominent example is the Apple Vision Pro. When that headset launched, Sony was its sole supplier of the OLED microdisplays, which is one reason the device was supply constrained: reports put Apple's 2024 shipments at up to roughly half a million units, limited in part by Sony's panel output. Apple began testing Chinese suppliers such as BOE and SeeYa to add a second source for future models, but for the first Vision Pro the panels came from Sony. Sony's own SRH-S1 uses the same family of micro-OLED panels, so the component business and the headset business feed each other.

Product timeline

Year	Product	Category	Display	Notes
2011	HMZ-T1	Personal 3D Viewer (head-mounted)	Two 0.7" OLED, 1,280 x 720 per eye	First model; simulates a 750" screen; no head tracking
2012	HMZ-T2	Personal 3D Viewer (head-mounted)	Dual OLED	Second generation
2013	HMZ-T3 / HMZ-T3W	Personal 3D Viewer (head-mounted)	Dual OLED	T3W adds battery power and WirelessHD streaming
2016	PlayStation VR	Console VR headset (PS4)	5.7" OLED, 960 x 1080 per eye, ~100 deg FOV	Needs PlayStation Camera; PS5 compatible via adapter; 5M sold by end of 2019
2020	Spatial Reality Display ELF-SR1	Glasses-free 3D desktop display	15.6" 4K LCD (3,840 x 2,160)	Eye-Sensing Light Field Display; not near-eye; 4,999.99 USD
2023	PlayStation VR2	Console VR headset (PS5)	Dual OLED, 2,000 x 2,040 per eye, HDR, ~110 deg FOV	Eye tracking, foveated rendering, headset haptics, Sense controllers; 549.99 USD
2023	Spatial Reality Display ELF-SR2	Glasses-free 3D desktop display	27" 4K LCD (3,840 x 2,160)	Larger SR1; adds OpenGL and DirectX support; ~5,000 USD
2024	PlayStation VR2 PC adapter	PC accessory for PSVR2	(uses PSVR2 panels)	Released Aug 7, 2024; enables Steam VR; no eye tracking or HDR over PC
2025	SRH-S1 (XYN)	Professional XR headset	1.3" OLED microdisplay, 4K per eye	Built with Siemens for NX Immersive Designer; ring and pointer controllers; 4,750 USD