Pimax Creates Rugged Versions of its 8K, 5K Plus and 5K OLED Headsets for Commercial use

While virtual reality (VR) headsets are fairly durable pieces of kit, they do tend to be designed for home use rather than public, which can lead to undue wear and tear. To combat this Pimax has announced a new rugged version of its three main head-mounted displays (HMD), the 8K, 5K Plus and 5K OLED. 

Pimax RE

The new series of headsets are the Pimax 8K RE, 5K Plus RE and 5K OLED RE, all focused business and location-based entertainment (LBE) use. While the outside has a stronger more hard-wearing design, with improvements such as water resistance, a rigid headstrap and thicker cabling, the internals are still the same with a 200-degree diagonal field of view (FoV) and the high-resolution screens the company is known for.

Currently, Pimax has yet to confirm when the new versions will be made available to business customers, or how much each will cost in comparison to the standard models. If you happen to be at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this week Pimax is there with some samples to showcase.

In addition to the new rugged headsets, Pimax has also announced a new partnership with Ecoplants, a company which specialises in 3D scanning for PBR (Physically Based Rendering) material. The pair will be at GTC 2019 to present a new VR application that aims to tap into various industries. It’ll include features such as hand tracking, inside out position and rotation tracking, as well as hundreds of digital asset’s produced by Ecoplants.

Pimax RE

Kevin Henderson, Head of US Operations and Spokesperson for Pimax VR, said: “With the announcement of our new RE series, our goal is to redefine the value proposition for ruggedized B2B VR headsets to encourage and promote powerful commercial use cases together with our current and future customers. We believe that in partnership with more innovative companies like Ecoplants, we will be able to achieve the goal of delivering VR2.0 to the business market.”

As Pimax continues to expand, VRFocus will bring you all the latest announcements from the company.

Pimax’s Answer to Rift’s Asynchronous Spacewarp ‘Brainwarp’ to Exit Beta This Week

Pimax today announced their Brainwarp software will be coming out of beta soon with the official launch of Brainwarp version 1.0.

Like Oculus’ Asynchronous Spacewarp, Brainwarp was designed to reduce the massive hardware requirements needed to run the headset’s high resolution displays; it’s also touted for its ability to improve latency and maintain acceptable refresh rates.

The 1.0 release will include three main tools, all of which were seen in the previous Brainwarp beta first released in January. Pimax says the official release “will ensure a smooth and optimized VR experience.” Brainwarp 1.0 is said to release sometime this week, although the exact date isn’t certain at this point.

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The tools include: Smart Smoothing, Fixed Foveated Rendering (FFR) and Refresh Rate Switching (RRS). The company says these can be enabled or disabled individually by the user as needed.

Here’s a quick roundup of each tool, and how they’re positioned to improve the user experience with Pimax’s headsets, including Pimax “8K”, “5K” Plus, and “5K” XR (ex-“5K” BE).

  • Smart Smoothing: compensates for low frame rates by halving the effective frame rate to 45 fps and filling with synthetic frames as necessary, much like Oculus’ ASW or Valve’s Motion Smoothing. Pimax says you can use GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or GTX 1070 to play most VR games with any of its headsets thanks to Smart Smoothing.
  •  Fixed Foveated Rendering (FFR): renders the center of the lenses at full resolution and progressively diminishes the resolution outward toward the user’s peripheral vision. Pimax claims performance gains of a typical VR game are between 10-30%. Compatibility with this feature is currently limited to NVIDIA RTX GPUs.
  • Refresh Rate Switching (RRS): can be used in conjunction with Smart Smoothing and FFR. With different mode options for the refresh rate (5K Plus: 90/72/64Hz, 8K: 80/72/64Hz), users have the ability to select the mode for their desired use with different games to achieve the best experience.

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