With no information some 10 months after the announcement of its latest VR headset, the ConceptD OJO, we started to wonder what had come of the device. After reaching out to the company, Acer has confirmed to Road to VR that the headset has been cancelled.
Following its original Acer WMR headset and the Acer OJO 500, the company had announced in April last year the newest OJO headset which was intended to fall under the company’s new ‘ConceptD‘ brand, a high-end product series aimed at professional creators.
But the Acer ConceptD OJO is no more, the company confirmed to Road to VR.
A spokesperson offered little in the way of details, stating only that “We have decided to discontinue the development and production of the ConceptD OJO headset.”
The ConceptD OJO was expected to be based on the same WMR tracking and software ecosystem as its predecessors, and touted some impressive specs: 2,160 × 2,160 resolution per-eye (matching the HP Reverb) with hardware IPD adjustment, a detachable visor, and a revamped head-mount with integrated audio. While a price for the headset was never announced, we expected it would compete directly with the HP Reverb and be priced similarly around $600.
It’s hard to say why (or precisely when) Acer decided to cancel the headset, but we have two good guesses.
First, Acer’s VR headsets have been built on Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality platform, which ties some of the headset’s hardware and software to Microsoft’s will. In the last few years Microsoft has shown little interest in further developing the foundation it created with the WMR VR headsets, and Acer may have been wary about going further down the rabbit hole with a platform that may wind up abandoned.
Second, the company may be more broadly shifting priority away from VR; this isn’t the first headset Acer has cancelled, it also shelved the promising StarVR headset back in late 2018. Though StarVR was an outside venture, Acer took majority control of the company in late 2017. All seemed to be going well, even right up to taking developer pre-orders for the headset, but then quite suddenly the project went up in smoke.
That was a few months prior to the announcement of the OJO ConceptD headset (which even seemed to borrow from the StarVR head-mount design). But it’s possible that it simply took this long for the same forces that led to the cancellation of StarVR to catch up with the OJO ConceptD.
We’ve reached out to Acer to learn more about their future plans for VR, and the fate of their original Acer WMR headset and the OJO 500.