Hands-on: LG’s VR Headset Glimpses Higher Resolution and New Head-mount Options Coming to SteamVR

Tracking Performance

There’s not much to report here—Valve’s impressive SteamVR Tracking works on the LG VR headset seemingly just as well as it does on the Vive. During a 15 minute session with the headset, I saw no drops or hitches in tracking, and I wasn’t able to notice any tracking jitter.

When it came to the controllers, I didn’t have enough time to tell whether or not the difference in the controller’s shape had any noticeable impact on tracking performance compared to the design of the Vive controller. In a quick session of Racket: NX and Longbow, the controllers felt to track just as well as I’m used to when using a Vive.

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As of now the company isn’t saying when the headset will launch or what the price will be, though they did tell us that the pricing is likely to be similar to the Vive and that they’d announce more details about availability later this year.

As a prototype device, the LG VR headset is a great start for the company, and a total turnaround compared to the artless LG 360 VR mobile headset that the company launched last year. There’s some clear but tractable challenges to be solved before the device hits the market, but also a number of things we like about the LG VR headset compared to other VR headsets in the same class.

Presently the prototype isn’t what we’d call the “next generation” of VR headsets, but we’ll have to wait to see what the final device looks like after the company reveals the consumer model; even if the consumer version turned out to be exactly the same as the prototype, it’s still hugely important for consumers to have more than one choice in their SteamVR headset, which is likely to drive hardware innovation further as SteamVR headsets compete for marketshare.