Immersed, the team behind the titular XR productivity and co-working app, announced Visor last month, a slim and light VR headset designed for work. Now the studio has opened “fully refundable” pre-orders for two distinct flavors of the device.
Immersed is offering a 2.5K per-eye Visor model for $500 and a 4K per-eye Visor model for $750. Besides including different resolution OLED microdisplays, functionally both models are the same. The company is also offering a Founder’s Edition Visor 4K for $1,000, which is said to ship six months before the standard Visor 4K.
Immersed says on the website both 2.5K and 4K headsets include:
Hand & eye tracking
6 Degrees of freedom
5+ Screens
100° Field of view
Ultra widescreen
Custom IPD, nose-insert, and light-blocker
25% lighter than a smartphone
HD Color Passthrough
Stems & strap attachments Included
Image courtesy Immersed
It’s still early days, it seems. The Visor hardware is said to be “both wired and wireless,” indicating it has onboard processing for mobile VR experiences and a battery, however the company hasn’t released any specs yet on chipset or battery life.
The company says headsets are custom-built for each user however, which includes locking in each user’s interpupillary distance (IPD) and shipping nose inserts and light blockers which are “closest to your face’s shape,” Immersed says in the product’s description.
As for shipment dates, so far Immersed says it’s slated to “commence and continue [shipment] throughout 2024.” What’s more, Immersed says it’s offering those pre-orders as “full refundable reservations.”
Here’s the fine print:
Refund Policy: Preorders are fully refundable reservations. You may cancel your reservation at any time before your Visor is produced and receive a full refund to the original payment method by emailing support@visor.com. Due to the custom-built nature of Visor, fulfillment time will vary and shipment dates are our best estimates. Delays, if any, will be communicated via email.
The team behind XR productivity and co-working platform Immersed announced it’s creating its own PC VR headset designed for work.
Following the lead set by Bigscreen with its recently unveiled PC VR headset Bigscreen Beyond, Immersed has partnered a still unnamed “tech giant” to release its own VR hardware for the first time.
Dubbed the Immerse Visor, the tethered PC VR headset’s primary claim to fame is its slim and light design coupled with dual 4K micro OLEDs, providing a 100-degree field of view. It’s said to be “25 percent lighter” than a smartphone, probably putting its weight somewhere below 200g.
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Image courtesy Immersed
Image courtesy Immersed
Image courtesy Immersed
It’s also slated to include optical inside-out tracking, so users won’t need external base stations like with headsets that hook into the SteamVR tracking standard, such as Bigscreen Beyond and Valve Index.
Exact specs and features are still thin on the ground, however Visor is slated to provide a “custom fit,” making each headset unique to the user. While the studio hasn’t revealed how it will achieve this, it may do something similar to Bigscreen, which provides Beyond users to download an iOS app which scans the contours of their face, allowing the company to create custom facial interfaces.
It’s probably not going to be cheap either—at least not cheaper than hardware like Quest 2 and Quest 3, which are undoubtedly subsidized to incentivize software sales. The company says its main focus is professionals working on laptops, allowing users to have multiple screens. Immersed hasn’t announced pricing yet, however pre-orders are said arrive at some point later this year, so we should know more then.
You can watch the full announcement below, which includes interviews with the creators at Immersed.
I sat at my desk, with a Meta Quest 2 headset covering my eyes, looking like a bit of an idiot to my housemate. I’d just finished a work meeting where myself and two other colleagues had attempted to hold our weekly catch up, this time in a virtual space. At one point one of my teammates sat alone at his virtual desk, while we others couldn’t sign into the room. We could only view through our PC browsers.
We tried everything possible, including letting others host the room. There always seemed to be something holding us back and after twenty minutes of trying to connect, we gave up and promised to try different software next time.
Feeling a little deflated that our metaverse jaunt had fallen flat, I kept my headset on. I felt around in front of me for my laptop keyboard. I could physically see it, as I was logged into Horizon Workrooms and I’d paired my MacBook with the software, but I’m a useless touch typist and I couldn’t easily find my way to writing. So instead I decided to use my time for research.
I was sitting in a virtual space – an office that screamed Silicon Valley – and I’d just enlarged my virtual laptop screen to read an article for research. The replication of my MacBook was great, there was little to no delay between my clicking a Google Chrome tab and it happening on my headset. I’d lined up several pieces to read, grabbed my headphones and got started.
‘Outside’ my office the sky was Pixar blue, the neighbouring buildings looked like somewhere everyone travelled on Segways or motorised scooters. My virtual desk was large and free of the junk that clutters my real desk; behind me stood a large whiteboard on which I could cast things, or draw pictures if my team members ever actually got into my online workspace without connection issues.
I turned off notifications, opened my music app and selected an ambient playlist that mimicked the sounds outside a suburban home. I began reading faster than normal, absorbing each detail without my incessant need to re-read. I wasn’t losing focus or being distracted by my phone or a message from the work Discord.
After I’d reached the end of each article I sat back in my chair and looked around the ‘room’. It was such a clean space. Maybe a little sterile. A button in front of me changed the environment, so I selected a log cabin office. It didn’t beat the real world, but it stole me away from my hallway office at home where I have no windows, and transported me a little.
I’d fully expected this virtual working environment to be jarring or prohibitive in some way. Even the hand tracking that the Quest 2 was doing made life easier. There was no need to use the controllers, I was pinching my fingers together to select options or return to menus. It all felt oddly second nature, and a little Minority Report, minus the dystopia.
It was clear to me that reducing the number of distractions was allowing me more focus in my workday. Then things got a bit silly. I jumped from the Horizon Workrooms, which felt very corporate, over to Immersed. With Immersed, I got a great introduction and tutorial to set up my laptop, and I found myself with a similar setup to Workrooms. Except this time I was on a space station, or in a fantastical glowing world, or a living room which seemed Patrick Bateman’s cup of tea.
The major difference here, which I loved, was the ability to increase the screen size so it emulated a cinema screen. Reading now felt even more comfortable, and somewhat immersive. I reclined slightly in my chair and let the screen almost wrap around my vision, shrinking my visual focus onto just the text. Of course, five minutes later I decided to watch The Batman trailer on YouTube and that was an equally great experience, in my own personal cinema.
I was still doing the same things I’d do for portions of my workday – just reading – but everything which usually surrounds that was blocked out almost completely. If typing was tough for me in workrooms, however, then it was impossible in Immersed. There was no representation of my laptop keyboard and so I began skewing my head to peek out of the gap between my nose and the headset.
I could never fully shift my workaday life to one of these apps, but for concentrated reading, it felt like a wonder. I have an unfortunate quirk with my OCD (Obsessional Compulsive Disorder) which forces me to re-read sentences repeatedly and now that was gone. Not only that, but I retained the information after closing down my laptop and removing the headset.
I’m still a way from sitting in a virtual office with my colleagues, but I think I’d even be happy with that; being able to collaborate in real-time with those who live across the world, or simply look up and ask a question, breaking away from my work-from-home lifestyle. But even if those things never happen, I’m happy that I’ve found a new way to focus on the white papers and articles which build out my day.
Work platform Immersed is adding support for iPhone and iPad so you can see those devices in VR alongside your PC or Mac screens. Android support is coming soon.
The Phone in VR Beta streams the screen of your iPhone or iPad with low latency over the same local Wi-Fi network. The feature requires downloading the Immersed iOS app from the App Store to bring your Apple handheld into VR. Immersed is planning to release the Android version of the app in a few weeks and there’s a waiting list available. The software doesn’t track the location of your handheld yet, so typing on your touchscreen in VR is rather difficult at the moment, but if you have a dock for your device you can easily align the physical and virtual locations, and Immersed says that it is planning to eventually add tracking via ARKit and ARCore.
Immersed also used the WeFunder crowdfunding investor platform this week to raise more than $3.4 million in a new round of funding. The startup is aiming to raise $5 million by the end of the week.
I tried the feature with both an iPhone and an iPad and it worked well. The new addition can make it easy to keep an eye on notifications or an app open on your personal device while working inside a VR headset like Oculus Quest or Quest 2. I used a multi-device bluetooth keyboard and mouse to switch input control quickly from my PC to my iPad, and you can use the existing support for syncing up the location of a stationary keyboard to make it easier to type in VR.
Oculus Quest virtual workspace app Immersed now lets you bring in your real keyboard!
Immersed is an app that lets you and your team bring your monitors into a shared virtual workspace. Uniquely, it even gives you up to 5 extra virtual monitors- something once considered impossible to do performantly with the Windows OS. It’s priced at $15/month/person for a team of up to 4, or $30/month/person for larger teams.
There’s also a free version for solo use, though it’s limited to 1 additional virtual monitor.
It’s a manual calibration, and you’ll need to recalibrate if you change your Guardian safety boundaries or move the keyboard’s position. It also uses a preset keyboard model, so the non-alphanumeric keys won’t precisely line up unless your keyboard matches the model.
Those minor disclaimers aside, the result feels like the best typing experience in a publicly available VR app. Since you see both the keyboard and your hands you no longer need to touch type. Trying it out in a Quest 2 with the Elite Strap, I could see myself working in Immersed for hours. The virtual monitors feature finally delivers the infinite workspace promised by science fiction.
In a demonstration posted to reddit, Immersed founder Renji Bijoy demonstrated typing at 164 words per minute using this new feature – roughly 4x the average typing speed. Bijoy says that’s about on par with his typing speed outside VR, to be clear.
Companies like Facebook and HTC pitch virtual reality in the long term as a replacement for physical offices. Enabling full-speed text entry is necessary to meet this goal. Finding a VR-native way to type is an area of active exploration, but for the near future bringing the keyboards people already know how to use is likely going to be more practical.
A new productivity app called Immersed brings your full PC or Mac into VR and is now officially available for free download in the Oculus Store for Quest.
The app was announced as coming soon to Quest a while back and it is a bit of a mashup between Virtual Desktop and Bigscreen, with a focus toward productivity in VR and a tier that allows usage of the basic app for free with your computer’s actual monitor setup plus one extra simulated monitor. There’s also a paid tier, though, at $14.99 per month (as of this writing) which adds more simulated screens which is tailored toward small teams working together inside virtual reality.
There’s also an enterprise pricing tier planned as well but below is a break down of the features available in the two tiers available at launch.
“Desktop” Free:
Desktop in VR (hi-res, lag-free)
1 Additional Virtual Monitor
Virtual Webcam
Offline Mode
Public Virtual Co-Working
Remote Desktop coming soon
“Elite” $14.99 per month
All features in the free tier plus:
5 Virtual Monitors
All New Premium environments
4 private collaborators
Shared Whiteboard
Use 2+ computers simultaneously coming soon
“Limitless” (Focus) Mode coming soon
Customizable Workspaces coming soon
While Bigscreen has become tuned toward a kind of virtual movie theater and Virtual Desktop can be tweaked on Oculus Quest so that it runs PC VR games wirelessly, Immersed is aimed squarely at virtual workspaces and collaboration with colleagues and its developers continue to evolve the product toward that goal. The app comes with a free 14-day trial of the “Elite” tier and you can continue to use the free tier after the trial ends.
Two powerful remote work apps are available on Oculus Quest and coming to its official store later this year.
Immersed is a bit like Bigscreen and Virtual Desktop with strong support for accessing your Mac or other types of PCs in a VR headset with real-time desktop sharing while Spatial is a cross-device colocation platform that brings together distant teams to work on projects together in shared space.
Each can be accessed and tested for free on Quest now by signing up on their respective websites for early access. Immersed can be found here while Spatial is here.
While other types of software exist that do some of these things — like the apps listed above and the Spaces video conferencing add-on — these new services are being rapidly updated and honed to fill the needs or remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Spatial, for example, is announced as being free during the pandemic while Immersed plans to update so it can connect to “all of your computers to your headset simultaneously, streaming your avatar to your Zoom calls, workspace customization, presentation mode, team/user-access management, workflow-integration,” according to the company.
Representatives from both companies say they’ve seen huge spikes in demand since the start of the pandemic. Immersed is also accessible via Oculus Go while Spatial features support for HoloLens, Magic Leap and soon Nreal’s AR glasses, with support for more traditional devices like phones, tablets and laptops as well.
We’re planning to test both services soon, so subscribe to our YouTube channel to see those videos and other great footage of VR apps, and let us know in the comments below if you have any questions you’d like us to answer when we test them out.
For many, remote work may be a new long-term reality. In that spirit, Facebook today announced that it will be introducing more collaboration and productivity apps to the Oculus Store for Quest soon.
The first productivity apps are said to land on the Oculus Store later this year, including Immersedand Spatialas the company’s flagship examples of full-featured social/collaborative apps specifically targeted at enterprise users.
Immersed is coming to the Oculus Store on Quest this summer, the company says. The app, which emphasizes both solo and collaborative work over standalone VR headsets and PC/Linux/mac, has been available on Oculus Quest since June 2019. The company says more XR platforms are coming soon.
Spatial also offers a real-time collaborative space, however it’s approached the task from the AR side of things first, notably supporting HoloLens (1 and 2) and Magic Leap 1. It also supports web browsers and Oculus Quest, the latter of which is on a request-only basis. Spatial is said to arrive on the Oculus Store “in the coming months.”
It’s clear the company is taking a first big step in bringing these first two apps closer into the fold by pitching them to businesses alongside Oculus for Business, a program targeted at enterprise customers and developers looking to manage VR deployments and create in-headset experiences.
“Apps like these let people experiment with VR productivity solutions on their own—and for companies ready to scale larger, there’s still Oculus for Business to help you get there,” a Facebook spokesperson says.
