Goertek may not be a household name, but the China-based company is looking to gear up its manufacturing lines to produce a surprising number of VR/AR headsets and lenses soon.
Goertek recently announced a ¥4 billion (~$572 million USD) convertible corporate bond offering, one quarter of which will be invested in the company’s VR/AR manufacturing capabilities, the company says. The news was first reported by Yivian (Chinese).
Yivian notes that Goertek also hopes to push production of VR/AR devices to 3.5 million units annually, and increase output of “precision optical lenses and module products” to an annual amount of 5 million units.
Goertek may not be well known to consumers, however it plays a larger role in the VR/AR industry than you might think. It creates parts, reference designs, as well as finished white-label products for some of the biggest companies on the planet.
Mainly noted for its work in acoustic components, the Weifang, China-based company reportedly played a role in the creation the optical, structural and hardware design of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality headsets.
Back in 2018, Goertek struck a strategic partnership with WaveOptics, which at the time aimed to enable mass manufacture of waveguides for ultimately cheaper AR headsets.
Goertek and Qualcomm Technologies also collaborated on the 5G-enabled XR reference design using the new Snapdragon XR2 platform. At its unveiling earlier this year, it was said Goertek was “deeply involved in the system integration and manufacturing of the XR2 reference design.”
Yivian speculates that Goertek’s recent VR/AR manufacturing push may be related to Facebook’s inevitable follow-up of Oculus Quest, although that remains to be seen. A prospective next-gen Quest would however require that sort of wide manufacturing bandwidth suggested by the Goertek’s recent announcement.
Taking into account that the Quest platform has sold over $100 million in store content, Road to VR estimates Facebook may have sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million Quest units to date.
The post Chinese ODM Goertek Aims to Produce Over 3 Million VR/AR Headsets Annually appeared first on Road to VR.
As the name implies, Qualcomm’s standalone headset isn’t designed to be a consumer offering from the company. Rather a design that OEM’s can utilise to create their own headsets, much in the same way Microsoft did with Windows Mixed Reality headsets.
With a dual camera system on the front, the inside-out tracking seemed to work reasonably well. It was a shame there wasn’t a massive amount of space to wander around in, yet stepping backwards and forwards was completed without any latency and thankfully no walls were bumped into. To test this and the controller an on-rails demo took place inside a space ship manned by robots. After a quick sweep around the hanger it was time to shoot some bugs. This proved to be somewhat haphazard as the controller was fairly compact, so the headset cameras tended to lose sight of the device. This is the reason Windows Mixed Reality headset controllers have such a big ring, helping keep the controllers in view.
