HTC Vive Pro launched in April 2018 with a few key improvements over the company’s original 2016 HTC Vive headset, although its launch was marred somewhat by its steep retail price of $800 for the headset alone. Now the company appears to be responding to recent competition in the space by cutting the price of its Vive Pro headset permanently to $600.
Teslasuit is a London-based company that makes an enterprise-focused haptic suit like none other I’ve experienced thus far. I got a chance to go hands-on at CES 2020 this week to find out just what sets it apart from other haptic suits, many of which employ a series of vibrating motors in an attempt to simulate the sense of touch. Teslasuit is different though. In homage to Nikolai Tesla’s advances in electricity, Teslasuit delivers to the body a range of amperage that’s designed to leave a lasting impression.
Beyond the unique selling point of Varjo’s headsets—a novel display concept which offers ‘retina resolution’—the company is pioneering the way in which VR headsets could be a part of the day-to-day enterprise workflow.
At CES this week, Pico unveiled a pair of its latest standalone VR headsets, Neo 2 and Neo 2 Eye. While the company is targeting enterprise customers in the West, the Neo 2 line is eyeing up the same hardware category as Facebook’s Oculus Quest, and doing a solid job at that.
This week at CES 2020, Pico quietly revealed a prototype headset which its calling the Pico VR Glasses. This phone-tethered 3DOF ‘VR viewer’ was surprisingly complete, offering a decent resolution and field of view, focus adjustment, and motion controller in a compact form-factor that’s light enough to stay on your head.
When we caught up with CREAL and its light-field tech at CES 2020 this week, the founders also filled us in on the latest happenings with the company, including the closure of a recent funding round which, between investments and grants, brought in $7.4 million.
Owlchemy Labs has something to celebrate, as the Google-owned VR studio announced that its tongue-in-cheek parody simulator game Job Simulator (2016) has officially broken the one million unit sales mark.
Switzerland-based CREAL is developing a light-field display which it believes will fit into VR headsets and eventually AR glasses. An earlier tech demo showed impressive fundamentals, and this week at CES 2020 the company revealed its progress toward shrinking its tech toward a practical size.
VRLEO is a company based in Los Angles and Shanghai that’s looking to shake up the out-of-home VR scene with its arcade kiosks. At CES this week we got a chance to go hands on with the company’s flagship product, the LEO cabinet system, which includes a few novel technologies that aim to give it an edge over the competition.
Pimax announced some new additions to its line of wide field of view VR headsets recently. With the constantly growing number of headset variations and mind-boggling additional prefixes to account for, you’re certainly not alone if you can’t keep all of their headsets straight.
This week at CES 2020, China-based Jade Bird Display (JBD) revealed its latest portfolio of micro LED displays which the company is positioning as an ideal fit for AR and VR devices. Among the company’s miniscule displays is a one that’s smaller than a penny but capable of a blinding 3,000,000 nits.
Qualcomm has been using its heft as a mobile chip maker to accelerate the development of AR and VR devices because it believes the ‘immersive compute’ category is the long term future of the smartphone. It’s still early days, but with more than 30 headsets with Qualcomm chips now on the market, the company has become the key enabler of mobile XR devices. With the recent launch of Snapdragon XR2, its latest and greatest made-for-XR chipset, the company has further expanded its commitment to the sector.
Mozilla announced at CES this week that it’s bringing Firefox Reality, its VR web browser, to Pico headsets soon.
