By now it can be said that Varjo is making the world’s most high-end VR headsets, and not just because they’re slapping on a hefty price tag. With a core premise of ‘retina resolution’ that really delivers, Varjo’s headsets keep getting better even as they’re getting cheaper. Their visual performance offers an early glimpse of what mainstream VR headsets are unlikely to deliver for years to come.

We’ve been following Varjo since even before the launch of their first VR headset. Every time we’ve glimpsed a new headset from the company, there’s been clear progress in their mission to deliver the sharpest visuals of any VR headset. Varjo’s latest headset, the XR-3, is no exception.

During a meeting with the company in Silicon Valley I got fairly extensive hands-on time with the XR-3, both with its VR and AR capabilities. Despite being its least expensive headset yet, it’s also clearly the company’s best so far.

Photo by Road to VR

Cheaper but Not Cheap

Granted, the company’s headsets are far from anything you’d call affordable. At a whopping $5,500 (+$1,500 annually), XR-3 is the high-end of the high-end. But it’s a steal compared to the prior Varjo XR headset which cost $10,000 (+$1,000 annually). Meanwhile, the VR-3 (the model without advanced passthrough or inside-out tracking) has come down to just $3,200 (+$800 annually).

To be clear, these are enterprise headsets at enterprise prices, hence the annual service fee.

A Better Bionic Display

All of Varjo’s headsets make use of what they call the ‘bionic display’ system which makes use of a large ‘context display’ for a wide field-of-view, with an overlapping ‘focus display’ for true retina resolution (60+ PPD) at the center of the view. That’s two displays for each eye.

Image courtesy Varjo

The company’s earliest prototypes proved that the company’s unique display system really could deliver retina resolution at the center of the image, but it came with a handful of caveats. I used to have to make mockups (like this) to make it clear to people that only the very center of the display was retina quality and that the boundary between the focus display and the context display was quite apparent.

Varjo’s headsets have gotten better about this over the years, and on the XR-3, the boundary between the focus display and the context display is nearly invisible. This is thanks not only to better blending between the displays, but also because the lower fidelity context display (which provides the wide field-of-view) itself has been boosted in resolution significantly over previous models. Even if the XR-3 didn’t have a focus display for retina resolution at the center of the image, the resolution of the context display alone (2,880 × 2,720) exceeds something like the Vive Pro 2 (2,448 × 2,448).

It’s thanks to this boost in resolution that moving your eyes away from the focus display no longer brings an obvious reduction in quality. This makes it feel much more natural to look around with your eyes in XR-3, whereas on earlier headsets it could feel like you had to train yourself not to let your eyes wander from the center of the field-of-view. This pairs nicely with an expanded overall field-of-view compared to the prior version of the headset, which jumps from 87° to 115°, according to Varjo.

In practice, donning the headset reveals a higher fidelity view than I’ve seen in any other VR headset to date. The center of the field-of-view is truly ‘retina resolution’—the screen-door effect is non-existent and there’s not a hint that the center of the image is even made of pixels.

Photo by Road to VR

While the fidelity of the image is truly world class, there is one notable issue that kept me from being lost in it entirely. On XR-3 I noticed a surprising amount of pupil swim, which makes the image look wobbly as you move your head around, especially when you lock your eyes onto an object in the scene and continue to move your head. The effect was bad enough that I expect it will cause discomfort to some users who are very sensitive to motion sickness.

I don’t know the exact cause of the pupil swim on XR-3. It could be inherent in the lenses, or it could be a calibration issue. And while I didn’t have the company’s other headsets to go side-by-side with, I don’t recall noticing it so clearly on prior models. Hopefully it’s something that can be fixed.

Continue on Page 2: Passthrough AR & Ergonomics »

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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."
  • wow

    The annual fee is what deters me. I’ll stick to pimax for now.

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    • Bob

      I agree with this. The $3200 price seems significantly more bearable than the price of their previous headsets but the annual fee is still a major deterrent.

      It is expensive and if it was just the $3200 alone without the annual fee, I’m sure many individuals (dare I say “hardcore enthusiasts”) would jump at the chance to pick this up. I’m sure they’ll get there eventually and correct me if I’m wrong but I did read somewhere that Varjo were interested in expanding into the consumer market at some point. If things continue to go at the rate that they are now, in terms of their hardware iterations, it’d just be a matter of time before Varjo enter the consumer market with a product that doesn’t require an annual business fee.

      And rest assured – myself and the enthusiasts will be looking very forward to that day! Hopefully!

    • david vincent

      Why would you buy an enterprise VR headset, especially since SteamVR apps don’t take advantage of the headset’s unique foveal display system…

    • tomchall

      its an enterprise device, no 3 month RMA wait for an index at this class of device

      • wow

        I bought my pimax from a reviewer. It would have really annoyed me if I ordered any product and had to wait 3months to 1 year especially when I’m used to 1-2day shippi g from Amazon. I wouldn’t have bought a decent headset I had to wait.

  • Hmmm, this pupil swim seems like something that needs to be eliminated. I get a bit of wobble/distortion when I move my head around on my Quest 2, and I’d really like this kind of thing to be fixed asap.

    • kontis

      Valve’s engineer once posted on Reddit that serious comfort issues like this one was what drove them to embrace fresnel lenses, despite their other… glaring… problems.

      • RFC

        From valve’s Alan yates (originally posted on Reddit in relation to the Vive gearvr lens mod):-

        “frensel lenses were specifically designed to minimise some dynamic distortions that we know can cause discomfort and motion sickness. The frensel lenses were not selected for low mass, low cost, hiding subpixel structure, filling SDE or any of the other crazy conspiracy theories I have read. They were the only practical lens technology for hitting the overall set of optimisations we wanted, especially minimising eye-position dependent distortion with a single element. They are not “cheap” lenses and need special equipment to make well. They are lower mass than the “equivalent” non-frensel profile lens, but that is mostly a happy coincidence, if a conventional lens could achieve the same performance in the axes we care about we’d happily tolerate the small mass increase for the reduced stray light and easier moulding. Our goal was to have lenses that worked well for everyone, from the least sensitive to the most easily nauseated. Some people just don’t perceive pupil swim, at least not until you tell them what to look for, and some people once they see it can’t unsee it and it ruins all HMDs with swimmy optics forever for them. Most concerning is that swimmy HMDs cause nausea at an almost subconscious level, you don’t need to perceive it for it to make your experience using the HMD unpleasant.

        We also knew using frensel would mean accepting more stray light (aka “god-rays”) and would make the lens much, much harder to manufacture. It is technically difficult to make frensel lenses with low stray light by injection molding, you also have to be careful about spatial frequencies and a bunch of other important details. The Vive panels are brighter than other HMDs so we actually did quite well to keep the stray light to the levels you experience in the Vive lens. This is one of the many knobs HMD makers can use to deal with the various trade-offs in the optical system; turn down the brightness, soften the contrast, adjust the lens MTF, reduce the FOV, shrink the eye-box.

        There were a lot of design compromises in the Vive lens. Just whacking some magnifiers in front of a panel and calling it good will “work” to some degree, but devil is in the details if you want good performance. The entire point of a HMD is to produce stimulation of your visual system that is as close as possible to the natural light field you experience viewing the real world. At practical consumer cost points and with the technology available right now the lens is near-optimal for the panel and the objective function it was designed for.

        Why do you think almost every high-end HMD since our Steam Sight prototypes were demoed uses a frensel based lens design?

        Now I don’t for a moment suggest there aren’t better optical designs possible. We already have better ones, no doubt others working the HMD space have also caught up and likely have their own high performance designs for next generation HMDs too. I also recognise that some people care about different aspects of lens performance than others. But if you are wanting a “better” lens for your current HMD just realise there is a lot to try to optimise for at once and there is a great deal of prior art to understand before you can truly design something objectively better.”

  • DuxCro

    One day this visual quality will come to consumer headsets. Probably sooner than we think.

  • Rudl Za Vedno

    60+ PPD? Now that’s impressive!

  • MosBen

    Cue the people saying, “Absolute fail. It should be less than $1,000. Then they’d sell a lot more units and make more money.” because they don’t understand what an enterprise product is.

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  • Geoff

    In this hot market, they will have to enter the consumer space or somebody else will, knowing that this is no longer a concept product.

    • mpaforoufakis tsiou

      VR enterprise market today and in the next 10 years makes more sense than the consumer market

    • Lucidfeuer

      This is still pretty much in a concept product space, having “focus display” as they call it and even external tracking/passthrough system is still experimental even it should’ve been implemented from the very beginning of this VR paradigm.

  • Ad

    Are these using SteamVR or are they already openXR and their own times? I know they have their own SDK.

    Also how comfortable is it? I imagine this is easy to swap out pads, but I still expected some kind of luxury headstrap.

  • guest

    Uh, does it get bricked if you don’t pay your second years annual fee? And speak of bricks, do bricks more or less 980 grams?

    • Bernard Cozier

      I guess they can program an expiration date in the firmware until payment is made and can download a new firmware.

      • Lucidfeuer

        That’s not how it works legally (thank god), it’s like software update: if you stop being subscribed you just don’t get newer update but can of course continue using your current one

  • Manu

    We need a consumer version :) without fees
    Kindly support contacting Varjo https://www.facebook.com/varjodotcom/posts/3996656633794370

  • Bernard Cozier

    So what if a company decides they no longer need it after one year, they going to be forced to pay the $800 annually? How? On a canceled credit card?

    • benz145

      No they would stop paying the annual fee and some services would probably stop working.

  • Ben, I tried VR2 in the beginning of 2020 and I remember being disappointed by heavy lens distortions when I moved my eyes. So this seems to be a problem that haunts Varjo headsets since a while…

    • benz145

      Thanks Tony, next time I see one of the older models I’ll double cheak as well to compare.