We still can’t have a headset that looks like the one of Ready Player One and that costs $99.99 with Amazon Prime. Designing a VR headset requires a lot of effort and the collaboration of different professionalsĪnd designing a headset especially needs lots of compromises between quality, cost, comfort and a lot of other features.
#Leap motion v2 update#
Seeing all those different PCBs they were experimenting on in the lab (sorry, I was not allowed to take photos to them), and talking with the engineers that told me that every one of those boards required a lot of effort to be designed, and then manufactured, and then tested… and even some hacks to make them work if there were little problems (sorry, you can’t just recompile and ship an update with hardware)… opened my mind about the effort required in creating a headset. These are things that I could already think myself before going to Prague, but being there, watching so many passionate people working on so many things, from the circuits, to the lenses, not to mention the aesthetics, the testing and so on, make me understood for real how a headset is a complicated product that really needs lots of different kinds of expertise to be created. Or you manage to sort all of this, but the resulting headset is so expensive that no one can afford it. So you craft some new lenses and they are better than the typical Fresnel ones but the resulting image is terribly distorted and so the results is worse than what you hoped for. Maybe you have a fantastic display, but then you have also to change lenses.
Then there is the weight and the dimension: you can add amazing features, but maybe, in the end, the headset is too heavy. Actually, what we don’t understand is that there are a lot of aspects to take in count every time that a design choice has to be taken.įor instance, when I talked with the guy that designs the PCBs of XTAL, he said me that he has to coordinate with the other guy that cares about the mechanics of the device, because the board has to fit inside the shell of the headset with all the other components. We, the VR users, sometimes believe that the process is quite easy: “why don’t they add a different display to that headset? This way the resolution would be better!” or sentences like this one are something that we are used to saying continuously. Having a tour inside VRgineers, that is a startup that is trying to develop almost all the main parts of its headset, made me understand how creating a Virtual Reality headset is incredibly difficult. This is the setup where I tried the XTAL… I was so excited! I have been greeted by Ivo, that let me enter in VRgineers offices and that made me try the XTAL headset (more on this later on) and then the CEO Marek Polčák arrived and made me try the development version of the device and also let me have a tour of the company. I was really excited to visit VRgineers because I had never tried such a high-end headset. So, it is a high-end device tailored at enterprises, a bit like Varjo or the StarVR One. The problem is that this innovation has a price: the cost of the headset on the market is 4900€. The XTAL in all its magnificence (image by VRgineers)Īs you can see we are talking about a headset that really tries to push that technology at its limits… it really looks like a 2 nd gen device. Spatial 3D sound from a built-in sound card.XTAL is an enterprise headset with incredible specifications, like for instance: VRgineers is the company behind the high-end headset XTAL. To get there, I had to ask for information to people that was not able to speak English… it has been funny Me, super excited in front of the VRgineers’s office.
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