We haven’t heard much about Sony’s SRH-S1 standalone MR headset over the past year, which the company revealed at CES 2024. Now, the enterprise-focused device has an official launch date and price.

Released in collaboration with Siemens, the soberly-named Sony SRH-S1 is set to launch sometime in February 2025, priced at $4,750, which the companies are squarely aiming at enterprise. Orders begin on January 23rd, 2025, purchasable directly through Siemens.

While previously pitched last year to appeal to creatives, Sony and Siemens are clearly targeting industrial use cases; the companies say SRH-S1 will “enable the industrial metaverse” and enhance product design and manufacturing through Siemens’ set of high-fidelity mixed reality tools.

Image courtesy Sony

Offering 13.6MP (3,552 × 3840) per-eye using Sony’s own ECX344A OLED microdisplay and a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, the headset also packs in what Sony calls a “proprietary rendering technology” for real-time 3D object rendering.

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As a mixed reality device, Sony’s SRH-S1 also includes passthrough video, a flip-up visor, and a unique pair of ergonomic controllers designed for intuitive 3D interactions, presented in the form of a stylus-type pointer and ring.

Image courtesy Sony

Over the past year, Siemens has also refined its set of enterprise-focused Immersive Engineering tools, which aim to let SRH-S1 users design 3D assets in CAD, interact with models, and remotely conduct multi-user design reviews via Siemens’ cloud-based NX X platform.

“After previewing the HMD at CES last year, our collective teams have built a set of tools that revolutionize how mixed reality is used in the engineering space – to not only support global collaboration based on high-fidelity 3D models, but to enable co-creation directly on vital 3D CAD data in a managed, secure environment,” said Bob Haubrock, senior VP of Product Engineering Software at Siemens Digital Industries Software.

This follows the announcement at CES this week that Sony is set to launch a creative-focused headset for prosumers, called XYN, which for now doesn’t have a price or release date. While Sony is staying tight-lipped on XYN, which is said to be a prototype at this stage, it appears to indeed be a variant of SRH-S1, denoted externally by its black colorway in comparison to SRH-S1’s grey design.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.

  • Can you please provide sources for pricing and other information. Is very annoying that a lot of information here has no source. Where did you get the price from? At least share a link or tell us that you reached out to Sony and got a response including the price.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      The price doesn't come from Sony, but from Siemens, who during CES announed they'd sell the SRH-S1 as part or their professional CAD tool suite for USD 4750. If you follow the preorder link in the article above, you get to a short description by Siemens, followed by a registration form.

      The Sony XR headset for NX Immersive Designer
      The Sony XR head-mounted display will become available for purchase beginning January 23, 2025. Sign up below to request a Siemens sales representative contact you to begin the purchase process.

      This offer will include Siemens services and probably the required licenses to use it with Siemens NX Immersive Designer. The regular price that Sony will charge customers just for the headset will very likely be lower, though still in the thousands.

  • MosBen

    In before the people who this device isn't for complaining that it's too expensive for them.

  • Michael Speth

    Again, this proves that meta is selling their Garbage Hardware for thousands less than the actual cost.

    • Alex Soler

      Garbage?

      • Michael Speth

        The price of Q3 is less than the sum of its parts. Therefore it's garbage.

        • Alex Soler

          Mmmm… ok.

          • Michael Speth

            Not only that, but Meta consistently believes their hardware is not worth the at cost price let alone profit. They know that they couldn't sell it otherwise and so they know they are producing garbage.

          • Ali Meral

            You are a deeply disturbed person Michael:)

        • AS

          That's both misinformation and a false equivalence.

        • LP

          The price of consoles is always lower with the expectation of recouping from the content sold.
          If Sony sells empty hardware at cost price, no one buys it like they did with PSVR2 and they have to add PC support, which doesn't really save them either.

          • Michael Speth

            Sony would be out of business if it was losing billions per month on their PS5 console.

            Meta losing billions per month on VR. This is not business as usual. Copium

          • kool

            Nobody loses billions a month like meta. Consoles usually sell at or right above cost at launch it's not until a slim model do they actually make a profit off the console. I think the ps4 might be the exception it was cheap to make. But meta is losing billions because they invest in hardware only. I hope all the devs they bought are working on a meta verse that's fun. Because we're years away from a mainstream form factor why not get the software right now!

          • LP

            Consoles are sold exactly at a loss, below cost. It's called Razer and Blades model. It's been around for a long time.
            One can even think back to the days of the PSone.
            While specific numbers are hard to find, industry analysts at the time estimated that Sony was probably losing between $50 and $100 on every console sold during the initial launch period as well.

            I don't know what mainstream VR years you're talking about, but from what I see working in the industry, interest is waning, especially after the failure of Apple's headset and the massive shift from VR to AR.

            The mass gamer is more interested in handhelds like the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch 2 than another heavy low FOV diving mask.
            The industry has definitely gone down the wrong path.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Sony stopped selling PlayStation hardware at a loss after PS3, now making at least a tiny profit from the console right from the start, with peripherals like controllers selling for three times their production costs and more. Nintendo has never sold consoles at loss. The first Xbox sold at loss, but now they use the same AMD APU base as PlayStation and will very likely also sell mostly at cost.

            Subsidizing hardware became the norm for a time while consoles used expensive custom made hardware, but this ended more than a decade ago thanks to component standardization. People still keep referring to it when talking about Meta subsidizing Quest as a valid approach to create a market, when in reality all other players stopped because it was too expensive.

            The razor and blade model works because the razors themselves are cheap to produce and the blades that regularly have to be replaced are sold with a huge margin, making the total income from the blades way larger than the razor cost. That doesn't work when the average Quest customer spends less than USD 100 total on software, of which only 30% then go to Meta to recoup their costs.

          • kool

            Well playstation doesn’t operate like that especially after the ps3. the ps4 and PS5 were both sold for profit after the launch period. idk know what the mainstream form factor is for vr maybe something Orion like but we’ll never find out if it’s the goggles or not if there’s no reason to put on a headset.

    • eadVrim

      Even Sony has a garbage tracking of its PSVR2 headset on PC.

  • Alex Soler

    Ok one less to choose from :-D

  • "a unique pair of ergonomic controllers designed for intuitive 3D interactions". I've tried them both at AWE and CES: they are terrible, absolutely uncomfortable

  • xyzs

    It better be amazing…

  • sfmike

    Chalk this up to anther overpriced fail by Sony that will disappear without a trace after it loses money just like their 3D cameras and televisions.

    • Arno van Wingerde

      It might certainly fail completely, and I have my doubts about the input options. Using VR for 3D design seems an obvious path though, and the price is less of a problem there. Question is only which one. AVP has no controllers, Quest/Index too low res and too poor cameras for MR. So who is going to take that market?

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        The Sony SRH-S1 started as a purely inhouse tool Sony developed for their own designers/engineers, and then got extended in partnership with Siemens to work with their NX design software. So it may technically be impossible for it to fail, because its main value derives from Sony using it themselves, with selling it to others only an afterthought. Similar to large game studios creating custom game engines for themselves, not requiring to license them to others to justify continued development. Enterprise in general plays by very different rules than consumer electronics.

  • STL

    A halo headaset. ❤ Will it be PC VR ready?