Varjo, creator of high-end enterprise MR headsets, dipped its toes into the consumer VR market with the release of the Aero headset back in 2021. But now the company says its focus is narrowing on training sims and deeper integrations focused on enterprise customer needs, making a followup to the Aero headset is unlikely.

In an interview with Road to VR, Varjo chief product officer Patrick Wyatt talked about the company’s latest focus on deeper integrations of its headsets for specific use-cases.

Training sims, especially in military and aeronautics, have become an area of growth for Varjo, Wyatt says. The company is leaning into these use cases to focus on solutions and outcomes rather than just selling headsets and leaving the buyer to figure out how to best make use of them.

That’s meant working closely with companies like Leonardo—a major helicopter manufacturer—to build the Virtual Extended Reality (VxR) helicopter pilot training system in which Varjo headsets are a core part of the system. Thanks in part to the high visual fidelity of Varjo’s headsets, the system has achieved FAA FTD Level 7 Certification, putting the system in the highest category of flight simulators. Varjo claims this is the “first-ever VR-based training system to reach this certification level.”

As Varjo goes beyond just selling its headset off-the-shelf, the company says it’s growing its “solutions engineering” capability, which means working directly with customers to conceptualize and implement solutions that leverage Varjo headsets to address existing challenges.

To build confidence in its commitment to this business model, in recent years the company has built versions of its headsets to specifically address common needs. That includes a ‘Focal Edition’ of the XR-4 which adds auto-focus for the headset’s passthrough cameras. Compared to a fixed focal length, this makes the headset more appealing for use with up-close objects, like flight controls and readouts. There’s also the ‘Secure Edition’ of the XR-4 which the company says is for “classified environments.”

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Compared to the $6,000 base price of the XR-4, these specialized versions command a hefty premium: the XR-4 Focal Edition is priced at $10,000, and the Secure Edition can cost $14,000, if not more.

And now, according to Wyatt, Varjo is committing to supporting its XR-4 headset series through 2030, giving companies a long-term guarantee that its headsets will continue to do their job.

Image courtesy Varjo

With the shift toward long term headset support and helping companies build bespoke solutions, the company is clearly turning away from high-end consumer headsets.

Varjo Aero, released in 2021, was the company’s first, and possibly last, test in the consumer waters. The company had once expected Aero to become an ongoing series of headsets aimed at VR enthusiasts. But when asked about a follow-up to Aero, Wyatt tells Road to VR, “No one is gonna say ‘never’ but we’re going more and more in the other direction.”

While unfortunate for VR enthusiasts, it’s likely the right call for the company. While Varjo headsets have excelled in visual clarity, size has never been their strong suit. Enthusiast VR headsets in recent years have increasingly been focused on reducing size and weight. Recent headsets like Bigscreen Beyond and the MeganeX Superlight are tiny compared to any headset Varjo has built. Chasing that trend to meet demand in the enthusiast market would mean fundamentally rethinking the optics and capabilities of Varjo’s headsets.

Varjo says its seeing growing demand for its headsets and solutions beyond the consumer space, telling Road to VR that its business volume from military applications has doubled since the launch of XR-4 at the start of 2024.

The company also says it employs more than 200 people and claims its technology is used in 19 of the 20 largest global defense and aerospace organizations, and 25% of Fortune 100 companies.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    Just two weeks ago Varjo introduced the Varjo Base Pro subscription for USD 2500 per year, or USD 5000 for a perpetual license. It doesn't really add new features, instead they removed important XR features from XR-4 like access to passthrough and eye tracking data. Existing XR-4 owners automatically get a perpetual license, but new buyers will now have to pay for access.

    This is kind of acceptable in the professional world, where service contracts are normal (or even demanded by the buyers), and the now guaranteed support until 2030 will be worth a lot for often expensive in-house projects. But it pretty much kills the XR-4 as a potential device for prototyping of future XR applications for independent developers that would be willing to pay USD 6000. Access to camera data was one of the unique advantages of the XR-4, while pretty much everybody else had locked it away for privacy reasons.

    Apple and Meta now allow access to the passthrough cameras for AR applications, but eye tracking data is still elusive, with Apple guaranteeing that the data never leaves the AVP, so not even they could abuse it, let alone any developers. I'm not sure how Pimax handles eye tracking on the Crystal, but those in need can still buy HTC's eye tracking modules or add the FOSS EyeTrackVR for about USD 25 in hardware plus a lot of work to pretty much any existing VR headset.

    • XRC

      The pimax Crystal is locked to Tobii lower tier gaming license providing automatic ipd, headset position indicator, dynamic foveated rendering (with suitable injector).

      this can be jail broken using "broken eye" by ghostiam which exposes the full eye data including camera streams. This isn't officially supported, but pimaxians tend to be tech savvy so it's not difficult to enable.

      the Crystal Super just released, using same Tobii license and Omniwhatever already confirmed broken eye is working on his headset

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        I was confused how the hell HP got dragged into this with their USD 1500 enterprise subscription required to unlock access to all the sensor data on the HP Reverb G2 Omnicept headset. Then I realized that "Omniwhatever" wasn't a reference to Omnicept, but an unrelated (?) username.

        • XRC

          Omniwhatever appears in disguise in their YouTube videos, focuses on technical testing currently with the Crystal Super and Rtx 5090

          the enterprise tier of Tobii is ocumen which is the full data access package

      • Andrew Jakobs

        The tobii license is what makes using eyetracking expensive, the hardware itself is only a few bucks. That's why you always see added (tobii) eyetracking to be around $200 more as without, it's the license which is the large extra costs. Sony could keep their eyetracking costs liw because they seem to use a way which doesn't infringe on the Tobii patents.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Sony actually scrapped their own eye tracking for PSVR2 and partnered with Tobii, announced in mid 2022. Tobii informed investors that this deal would make up (more than) 10% of their 2022 revenue, which ended up at USD ~70M, so USD 7M+ from Sony.

          This wasn't solely for software and patent licenses though, as Sony contracted Tobii to port and improve their existing eye tracking suite to PS5. Completely ignoring that and also arbitrarily assuming that this sum covered the software/patent license for the 2M PSVR2 Sony expected to sell at the launch in 2023-02, each PSVR2 would have included a USD 3.5 license fee for Tobii, ~1.5% of the estimated build costs of (less than) USD 250

          There is a huge margin of error on top of unwarranted oversimplification and assumptions, but Sony expected to sell a lot more PSVR2 than all VR HMDs that had ever shipped with Tobii eye tracking combined. So they were probably able to negotiate a favorable deal with Tobii, who at that time had operated at a loss for pretty much a decade. I doubt that Tobii charges Pimax USD 50 for the limited gaming license, while they might bill Varjo (a lot) more for the integration of the full software suite with the USD 6000 XR-4.
          https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/79cda7c09bbb03b172f38287d3b657776031b1ecb104a871e6612d1b8429e7a4.png

  • xyzs

    That shows how overpriced the p2p market is.

    The price of technical insurance is where the big margins are.