Earlier this week VRFocus wrote a full hands-on of Pimax’s offerings at CES 2019, detailing what we thought of the 8K and 5K Plus headsets, as well as the eye-tracking and hand-tracking modules. The company was certainly at the show to impress, with a much larger stand than the previous year, plus there was the new US Head of Operations to talk to, Kevin Henderson.
With so much on display at CES 2019 Henderson had quite a bit to discuss, mainly focusing on an area both Pimax and consumers feel is important, logistics. Having originally started as a highly successful Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, the company has a lot of backers to satisfy (just under 6,000 in total), concentrating on upping production to get those orders fulfilled. He notes several figures, claiming producing is at 200 units per day and climbing, while 135 units are being shipped per day, so Henderson expects most backers to get their headsets ‘pretty quick’.
At the same time, Pimax is expanding operations across the US (with plans for Europe as well) to ensure it can quickly and smoothly deal with any issues customers may come across. Should a headset need a repair or service of some kind, then Pimax aims to make sure customers only go days without their device rather than spending weeks going back and forth dealing with issues.
Pimax is solely concentrating on getting headsets out to buyers for the time being, with the modules sounding like they’re not going to be available just yet. All the Pimax headsets are modular, so you can add eye-tracking and hand-tracking as and when they become available.
Henderson goes on to discuss features that have been or are going to be added such as being able to change the FoV, or changing colour and contrast. Then there’s the newly released Brainwarp 1.0 which is now live, and is essentially a similar Smart Smoothing algorithm, which is similar to Oculus’ “ASW” and SteamVR’s “Motion Smoothing”, with Pimax noting on a forum post: “With Smart Smoothing technique, our users are expecting to get good performance on GTX1070 or GTX2060 when playing most of the VR games with 8K or 5K+ headset.”
Check out the full interview below, and for further Pimax updates, keep reading VRFocus.
Looking very similar to Valve’s Knuckles design, the Pimax controllers come in two variations, with a touchpad on both or joysticks on both controllers. Pimax will showcase a prototype of both the thumbstick and trackpad open-palm controllers at CES 2019, designed for a natural fit and compatible with multiple devices including the Steam VR tracking 1.0 and 2.0.