XTAL 3 is the most immersive virtual reality headset I’ve ever worn.
Humans beings can, without eye rotation, see roughly 210° horizontally. Just over a decade ago, head mounted displays peaked at around 50° horizontal – any wider starts to introduce geometric distortion. An important innovation of Palmer Luckey’s original Oculus Rift prototypes – and a core reason for the Kickstarter campaign’s viral success – was the dramatic widening of the field of view to roughly 100° while still remaining affordable. This was achieved by correcting for the lenses’ pincushion distortion in software with a barrel distortion effect, so it cancels out to a stable image.
In the decade since, almost every VR headset has followed this same optical design pattern and offered roughly the same horizontal field of view, plus or minus 10°. The few exceptions were expensive enterprise-focused headsets such as XTAL’s previous models (~150°), and a startup with some past quality assurance and delivery issues called Pimax (~170°). But these exceptions all had a serious flaw – with most lens designs the field of view beyond around 120° has uncorrectable distortion. In practice, this means the virtual world warps in the periphery as you look around, like looking into a fish bowl or wearing a scuba mask.
Some people say they can accept this distortion, or at least that they prefer it to the somewhat claustrophobic feeling of mainstream headsets. But for me, the virtual world and the objects within it need to be geometrically consistent or the illusion of presence breaks. Back in 2014 at Steam Dev Days, Valve’s Michael Abrash (who soon after became Oculus Chief Scientist) noted the following: “optical calibration seems like a minor point, but has proven to be critical and hugely challenging, because the human visual system is astonishingly sensitive to slight errors […] this destroys presence and can induce motion sickness almost instantaneously”.
When I first arrived at XTAL’s CES booth I was placed into a demo running the popular DCS simulator (available on Steam). I was severely disappointed at first. While the field of view was impressive, the lens distortion was apparent in all but the very center. Upon taking the headset off, however, I was greeted by Vrgineers founder Marek Polcak, who had been on the other side of the booth. He explained that what I’d tried was actually the previous model, and quickly escorted me into a demo of XTAL 3.
As soon as I put on XTAL 3, I realized I was looking at a completely different lens design. Not only was the field of view actually wider, the distortion was gone. It is the most immersive VR headset I have ever used – and there is no close second. In case you’re wondering, both headsets felt comfortable to wear despite the comically large design.
So what’s the catch? Well, it’s the price of course. XTAL 3 is a $10,000 headset, intended for use in enterprise and public sector training such as flight simulation. But Polcak claims this price is more a function of the low-volume high-support current audience. He told me XTAL is currently in initial talks with mass market consumer electronics companies such as Razer with the eventual goal of a more affordable headset, which could sit at the high end of the consumer spectrum (or dare I say, “prosumer”).
Here are the specifications for XTAL 3, according to Vrgineers:
Displays: 3840×2160 per eye fast-switch LCD
Refresh Rate: 75Hz at 4K or 120Hz at 1440p
Field of View: 180° horizontal × 90° vertical
Weight: 600 grams without head strap
Eye Tracking with foveated rendering and automatic IPD adjustment
Platform: SteamVR or OpenXR
VR enthusiasts have been longing for ultra wide field of view for years. HTC has widened its lenses only slightly and the field of view of Meta headsets has stagnated. Peripheral vision is crucial to feeling truly present in a virtual space, and XTAL 3 is the first to get it right. But the question remains: exactly how long will it take for consumers get this too?
This year’s CES in Las Vegas has seen virtual reality (VR) hardware announcements from the likes of Shiftall (a Panasonic subsidiary) and Sony (officially naming PlayStation VR2). One headset that’s gone under the radar is the XTAL 3, the latest high-end incarnation from VRgineers. Aiming squarely at enterprise and military clients, the XTAL 3 comes in two editions starting from just under $9K USD.
XTAL 3 Virtual Reality
VRgineers’ XTAL has always focused its efforts towards wide field of view (FoV) applications, flight simulators in particular. That’s why the company boasts clients including the U.S. Air Force, NASA and BAE Systems among others. Designed in cooperation with Air Force pilots, the XTAL 3 will come in VR and mixed reality (MR) configurations – similar to Varjo’s latest devices – with both offering two 4K resolution displays (3840×2160 per eye), a 75Hz refresh rate at 4K (120Hz at QHD), eye tracking, inside-out tracking, and an Auto IPD adjustment range of 60-76 mm.
After that, the specifications do start to differ due to the XTAL 3 MR’s capabilities. For example, the XTAL 3 VR offers a 180° horizontal and 90° vertical FoV, whilst the MR edition is slightly less at 170° horizontal. With a pair of 4K cameras, the XTAL 3 MR headset does weigh in at 700g, 100g heavier than its VR sibling.
“The central cover of the headset is removable and reconfigurable, making it possible to change the headset from purely virtual to mixed reality, or replace inside-out tracking with ULTRALEAP hand tracking,” says CEO and co-founder Marek Polcak in a statement. “We can assure all our clients that the XTAL 3 will be compatible with all existing and future technologies they might need while maintaining the highest levels of comfort and convenience.”
XTAL 3 Mixed Reality
“Our new one-dot calibration removes the biggest obstacle to the wide adoption of foveated rendering technology. The major bottleneck has always been the time-consuming calibration process necessary before every use of the foveated rendering feature,” Polcak explains. “The XTAL 3 calibration process uses unique one-dot calibration that creates a virtual mathematical model of the user’s face allowing us to calculate precise calibration formulas for eye tracking.”
So how much does all this cost? Well, the XTAL 3 VR starts from $8,900 USD excluding taxes whilst the XTAL 3 MR comes in at a rather more substantial $11,500. Making it quite the purchase if you want the ultimate Microsoft Flight Simulator experience.
VRgineers hasn’t solely been working on the new XTAL 3 either. In December, social VR platform Somnium Space released new details regarding its own standalone headset that’s being built in collaboration with VRgineers. This consumer-grade headset is expected to arrive in Q4 2022.
The XTAL 3 VR and XTAL 3 MR headsets are expected to ship to pre-order customers this April. For further updates from the VRgineers team, keep reading VRFocus.
Somnium Space is planning to release a new standalone VR headset with the help of XTAL maker, VRgineers.
But, wait, who are Somnium Space?
You’d be forgiven for not having heard of the company before today, but Somnium has been around for a number of years working on what it claims is “the world’s only VR metaverse built on blockchain”. It operates a social VR platform of the same name, available on SteamVR, in which users can buy virtual land. In 2019 the company raised $1 million to expand its platform.
The headset itself was revealed at Somnium’s own ‘Connect’ event (no, not that Connect) in Prague earlier this week. The company says its device is powered by Qualcomm’s XR2 platform with 6DOF inside-out tracking via four cameras and sports 2,800 x 2,800 displays with a horizontal field of view greater than 115 degrees. VRgineers — known for its professional-grade XTAL headset, various models of which offer top-end specs at a high price — is also working with the company to deliver custom lenses similar to those in its own devices.
Other planned features include both wired and wireless connections to PC for SteamVR access, with native Lighthouse tracking and controllers apparently in the works. To that end, the device will be modular, with swappable elements like the front faceplate and there’s onboard buttons too. The headset has been in the planning stages since early 2021.
These are ambitious plans for sure, and it’s worth remembering the difficulties many other small to medium-sized companies have faced bringing VR hardware to market. DecaGear recently drastically revised its plans for a $450 SteamVR headset to $700, citing the realities of competing with Meta. Plus there are many vital elements of Somnium’s plans that still sound up in the air, like a reference to “researching Micro OLED displays” which would surely drastically change the shape and form of the product.
So, why does Somnium say it’s working on such a device? According to founder and CEO Artur Sychov, it’s to release a headset that customers truly “own”, with an open ecosystem that allows them to do what they want with the device. “We have seen a trend where many VR companies, big companies, were producing VR headsets that started to close their ecosystems, creating these silos of closed ecosystems and we, as the metaverse company, we cannot afford to risk that we will be dependent on some other ecosystems,” Sychov said on-stage during the event.
Somnium plans to ship its first headsets in Q4 of 2022, though it says it will not be running a pre-order campaign. “We won’t take your money until we’re ready to ship,” Sychov said. “Maybe a little bit earlier.” Exactly how much the device will cost hasn’t been revealed at this time, but this too will be key to seeing what kind of adoption and developer support Somnium can gain. If its plans do come to fruition, however, expect its own take on the metaverse to be a big focus for the headset.
What do you make of Somnium’s VR plans? Let us know in the comments below!
Neben der HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Valve Index und den Windows Mixed Reality Brillen gibt es noch viele weitere VR-Brillen und VR-Zubehör, für ganz spezielle Einsatzgebiete oder für professionelle Anbieter. Doch wo diese Hardware bestellen?
Besondere VR-Brillen in Deutschland bestellen
Wenn man nach besonderen VR-Brillen sucht, bleibt einem oft nur eine lange Recherche und ein paar Formulare, um bei den Herstellern ein Interesse anzumelden.
Während ihr bei Amazon und Co. zwar die gängige Hardware für Konsumenten erhaltet, bietet Bestware aktuell ein echtes Schlaraffenland für VR Nerds. Ihr bekommt dort beispielsweise die Brillen von Varjo, XRSpace, Pico, XTAL, HP oder Handschuhe von Manus.
Dies ist keine bezahlte Werbung, sondern ein Tipp an unsere Community. Ich wollte in erster Linie dieses Angebot mit euch teilen, da ich selbst von der aktuellen Auswahl überrascht war und mich sehr freue, dass es einen einfachen Weg gibt, um an Hardware zu gelangen, die nicht bei den üblichen Händlern gelistet wird.
Unless you’re a big global company with plenty of money to burn standing out at the world’s largest technology event, CES can be a little difficult. Even so, that didn’t stop Prague-based VRgineers, the virtual reality (VR) headset manufacturer behind XTAL from trying to make an impression. The company attended the event to showcase its new 8K resolution headset and did so in style, bringing a massive flight-sim rig for guests to test the improved resolution. This also proved to be an opportune moment to chat with CEO and co-founder Marek Polcak about the 8K XTAL.
From the outside the new XTAL 8K looks no different from its 5K sibling, offering that striking crystal design, the wide 180-degree (FoV) as well as the built-in hand-tracking from Ultraleap. It’s only when you put on the headset that the difference becomes clear.
First and foremost VRgineers has designed the XTAL to be an industrial headset, suited to companies and organisations which require high-resolutions and wide FoVs for an unincumbered VR experience. This has led XTAL down the simulator route, flight-sims in particular. Because of this specialism, VRgineers has been working with the likes of the US Airforce and US NAVY to aid in their training programs. During CES 2020 it was announced that Vance Airforce Base in Oklahoma will be the first to receive the 8K version, helping upgrade its training centre.
Hence why VRgineers chose to bring a massive pneumatic rig to the expo, where guests had to climb up and in via a ladder to have a go. The setup featured full flight controls and for that added feel of realism, the XTAL was attached to a flight helmet. It’s the fine detail which sets the 8K headset apart from other VR devices. The landscape outside the cockpit looked nice enough but it was the clarity of all the dials and switches which truly impressed – understandable why the US Airforce was using it.
After a nice flight around Dubai airspace, it was time to talk with Polcak about the XTAL 8K and the work that went into upgrading the headset. Check out the interview below to see what he said and to see the rig in action. The new XTAL is expected to be commercially available in the second half of Q1 2020. For further updates, keep reading VRFocus.
CES is a strange conference. Across endless aisle after endless aisle a mixture of companies looking for suppliers, distributors, press or investment present wares in hope of making the year ahead one of major success for their business. The conference always presents a roadmap for the future of technology and it has been that way since the ’60s. Seeing the actual pathway ahead, though, is difficult to find through the manufactured hype and “best of” awards.
So I understand the comments we see from folks who want to know what was “good” at the conference who might be confused by vastly differing reports and reactions. Is the reporter able to describe what actually happened in their demo, or is their vocabulary lacking in describing if something went wrong? Do they gloss over issues? Are they sold the promise of the technology if bugs are worked out in a couple more years?
With this in mind, and the joy I know is already delivered so rapidly by Valve Index at home and Oculus Quest in a carrying case in my hotel room, I found myself largely unimpressed by almost all the AR on display at CES and much of the VR too.
“There is no doubt Oculus Quest has shown what the right mainstream consumer device is and while there was nothing immediately that will give the Quest a run for it’s money, I did try the new Qualcomm reference design and some other tech that suggests next year there should be many more all-in-ones that should get consumers and enterprise excited for the near future of VR,” AR and VR investor Tipatat Chennavasin explained in a direct message.
There were still hints of the future at CES 2020, but I need to address the difficulty and cost involved in polishing these technologies to the point of actual usefulness for businesses or mass appeal to consumers. That’s what this post is about.
So read on to understand what’s truly going on in VR and AR.
VR: Advances In Field Of View, Controller Tracking, And Headset Size
VR headsets at CES 2020 demonstrated advances on several fronts. None of these were entirely new, or entirely perfect, but all point to possibilities for the future.
Smaller Headset Designs
Several companies at CES demonstrated pancake lenses which dramatically reduce the physical size of VR headsets. These also generally featured a reduced field of view compared with current designs.
The one I found most interesting was Panasonic’s “VR Eyeglasses” which combined an incredibly light design with an innovative lens separation adjustment. Read my story about the Panasonic glasses.
While Pico showed a similar conceptual design alongside their Neo 2 and Neo 2 Eye I didn’t see any physical adjustment for lens separation on their glasses design. So the Pico glasses design made me extremely uncomfortable in a matter of seconds. The distance between my pupils is wider than many and I usually need that adjustment (which is found on both Index and Quest) to have a comfortable experience in a VR headset.
Huawei’s slim VR Glass design was also demonstrated by Nolo combined with their front-facing 6DoF tracking system as an add-on. BoxVR worked reasonably well in this configuration, but the $500 VR Glass plus Nolo kit only tracked my hands while facing forward. Under no circumstances would I be interested in a VR headset in 2020 or beyond that doesn’t let me turn around.
Combining pancake lenses with microdisplays is nothing new of course — eMagin showed this off in 2015 before even the release of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Since then, microdisplay suppliers have claimed that headsets using this kind of display system are just around the corner. But now we’re finally starting to see major consumer electronics companies explore this idea, which may mean it is now closer than ever to being in an actual product.
Expanded Field of View
Some VR headsets at CES 2020, like the nearly $8000 Xtal and all the Pimax systems, featured an expanded field of view compared with headsets like Oculus Quest and Valve Index.
Xtal demonstrated an impressive $50,000 motion simulator with their headset integrated into a flight helmet with its wide field of view and 4K per eye resolution offering incredible sights flying in an F-18 over Dubai. While enjoyable, I noted some distortions at the edges of the lenses.
The Pimax Demo
Pimax frequently makes promises then delays delivering on them again and again. We’ve also heard numerous reports of problems with their hardware ranging from minor to major.
While my colleagues found Pimax demos at previous events, my first Pimax Demo was at CES 2020 and the first time I put a Pimax 8KX on my head I tried Boneworks.
The first thing I noted is that content popped in at the edges of the display a second or two after the rest of the scene. When I mentioned it, the demo (said to be running from an RTX 2080 TI) was switched to parallel processing and that solved the problem, but within about five minutes the right eye started blinking to black every few seconds.
I asked for another 8KX to try with Boneworks and this one didn’t have the problems I saw before. Its wide field of view invited me to look around a little more and the high resolution of the panels were certainly nice, but I found myself also constantly distracted by the significant distortions and bending of the scene at the edges of the lenses — more significant than the distortions I saw with Xtal. My right hand also lost tracking with 8KX, but that’s not entirely unusual for SteamVR Tracking in convention settings.
We’ve heard some people with Pimax headsets artificially reduce the field of view of the system through software adjustment to avoid these distortions while still enjoying a relatively expanded field of view. My colleague Tatjana returned to the Pimax booth later in the CES week to try both the 8KX and Artisan. Aristan is Pimax’ newest headset which ends up priced comparable to Valve Index when you include controllers and base stations. She played Boneworks and Fruit Ninja and found herself sick to her stomach afterward. I, too, left the Pimax booth a bit woozy.
There are Pimax defenders out there and those who will find the expanded field of view a good fit for their strong stomachs and top of the line graphics cards. Indeed, I got sick repeatedly over my 12-hour play through of the Boneworks campaign with Valve Index, but didn’t get uncomfortable as quickly as I did with that Pimax demo at CES.
Surely a wider field of view is something we want in future VR headsets but I remain unconvinced we’ll see it at an affordable price other than from a major platform like Facebook, Valve, Sony, Google, or Apple with large teams developing both optics and eye tracking technologies which could make these devices more comfortable.
Overall, the repeated delays for Pimax products and less than stellar impressions at CES 2020 means that we will keep using words like “claim” to describe plans for products pitched by this company.
Alternative Tracking Systems With Pico
The Pico Neo 2 and Neo 2 Eye, priced at $700 and $900 respectively, featured occlusion-resistant electromagnetic tracking. In the Neo 2, for example, I played Angry Birds and was able to pull back the slingshot while keeping my head turned away from the controllers. This is something I can’t do in an Oculus Quest. The Neo 2 also balances weight to the back better than Quest’s front-heavy design.
The Neo 2 Eye demonstrated Tobii’s eye tracking for the first time I’ve seen in a standalone design. Also for the first time I’ve seen, the headset tracked my eye movements without calibration. Typically, Tobii asks each wearer to point their eyes at a few dots at different corners of the scene to calibrate, and I was told that option is still available. The eye tracking without calibration seemed to work alright — I was able to target enemies in a scene by just pointing my eyes at them — but when I pointed my eyes downward it seemed to lose tracking.
I’d need more time with the $700 Neo 2 to say more, but I found it to be the only Pico device I’ve ever tried I might actually be interested in using. However, Neo 2 is only sold to businesses.
AR: Tracking Lacking, Power Problems And Severe Field Of View Limits For Years To Come
During the course of CES my colleague David Heaney described simply something that’s hard to grasp about the market for AR head-worn gadgets: Recognizing occlusion in your environment is to AR what 6DoF tracking is to VR.
This is to say that if an AR headset with see-through optics inserting digital content into your real-world environment cannot reliably understand when a person or object blocks simulated content from your view, the illusion meant to be provided by the hardware is broken. The same is true of VR headsets that do not track the position of your head. For example, if you wear an Oculus Go VR headset and decide to lean forward or stand up, the illusion of VR that you were enjoying is instantly broken.
Discomfort or confusion often follows in either case of severely limited VR or AR, and this represents a death sentence for the hardware. Failing to provide 6DoF tracking, or recognize occlusion, is so uncomfortable, I believe some headset wearers are discouraged from wearing the hardware ever again. Of course, some can learn to work around this limit.
There are fans of Oculus Go who understand its limitation and use the device as a low-cost personal media viewer. Nreal AR glasses, for example, provide a relatively large field of view for a similar genre of content. Still, without a complete and constantly improving understanding of the environment around the wearer, AR glasses like the $500 Nreal (and there were a lot of copycats at CES) are likely to consistently fail this test. Without passing this test walking out in the real world, the appeal of these kinds of AR hardware platforms is minimal to developers, to businesses, and to consumers.
“I would agree that for AR glasses to be truly useful and game changing, they would need not only solid 6DOF tracking (which none of the slim AR glasses I tried had), object occlusion, and object permanence but also really intuitive and reliable 6DOF input which was not also shown,” Chennavasin wrote. “I appreciate the effort being done by all the companies but it still looks like consumer AR is still years away.”
This roadblock for AR relates to two others — power consumption and field of view. Most AR glasses fail to deliver anything close to the amount of digital content to your eyes seen through most VR headset designs. This means that even in HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 1 — two dedicated AR headsets — you need to move far away from the digital content to get a full view of it and truly enjoy the sense of immersion it brings. Again, some can get used to this limitation but the bulky size and high price of these AR systems ($2,300 for ML1 and $3,500 for HoloLens 2) also prevents them from appealing to consumers.
Lastly, building the most detailed map of your environment typically means on-board cameras need to keep scanning the room to keep the map updated. Using those cameras drains power. One of the key reasons the first generation of phone-powered VR headsets were retired so quickly is because those headsets drained power from a device you needed to last the day for other tasks. So do phone-powered AR systems like Nreal have a shot if they drain phone battery power just like the already-defunct Gear VR, and are used for the same types of content as the $200 Oculus Go starting at more then double the price?
“I agree that power is a (possibly the) key constraint for HMDs. It’s one reason why active depth cameras are not the best solution for occlusion, and we are seeing 6D’s approach of using low power RGB sensors, combined with efficient Neural Net co-processors providing solutions to occlusion,” explained Matt Miesnieks, the CEO of spatial recognition company 6D.ai, in a direct message. “The first low cost AR headsets do need refinement, but we have some visibility into roadmaps, and as that refinement is primarily driven by software, we will see improvements very rapidly.”
With Nreal in particular I saw software that needed significant refinement, both in tracking and stability, to become more usable.
Short Term Potential Advances In AR And VR
CES 2020 confirmed to me what we’ve already seen elsewhere.
Tilt Five’s forthcoming consumer AR system uses a novel retro reflective method delivered as a game board that tunes for both a relatively wide field of view and the specific case of tabletop games. These aren’t glasses you’ll take out into the real world and since you are localized to the game board, occlusion isn’t as much of a concern. Tilt Five cost $879 during its recent Kickstarter for a three-pack of glasses and there are extensions to the board to expand it vertically to provide more height to the augmentation effect. Altogether, Tilt Five represents one of the most promising short-term AR projects we’ve seen. I contacted Tilt Five CEO Jeri Ellsworth and she suggested there may even be a way to charge companion phones, with a a pass through hub, while also powering the glasses.
“We have a huge advantage by containing our system.,” Ellsworth wrote in a message. “We also limit the compute on the device…by doing re-projection and in headset tracking which saves power.”
Shipping a hardware crowdfunding product isn’t easy, so there’s a lot to prove for Tilt Five, but after CES 2020 I’m still left thinking Ellsworth’s company remains the most interesting AR project approaching the consumer market in the near-term.
When it comes to VR, we know the future of the medium features wireless, higher field of view, more tracking of body features in a wider range of conditions and smaller, more well-balanced headsets. But taking all the best pieces of CES 2020 VR systems — Pico’s better balance, Xtal’s wide field of view, Panasonic’s slim design — and then polishing these features, adding on more and supplying them with content is an entirely different level of challenge than preparing an interesting demo.
I’m talking about spending billions of dollars and there are only a few companies positioned to make that sort of investment in the next couple years.
CES 2020 is coming to an end. We’ve been in Las Vegas, NV all week trying out cutting-edge hardware and software demos from companies all over the world trying to push the boundaries of VR and AR technology. As a result, we’ve collected our list of the best and most exciting things we saw for you right here.
Just like we did at E3 2019, we’re giving out two awards: Best of Show and People’s Choice. The Best of Show award winner and its nominees are all selected by UploadVR Editorial staff and the People’s Choice award winner is picked by you, our readers! We looked at our website traffic and social media engagement to determine the four nominees for that award and are using social media polls to pick the winner. This was done across two Facebook polls (Part 1 and Part 2) and a Twitter poll.
And if you want the full rundown on our impressions and all of the top news stories of the week from CES 2020, we chatted about it all live in our VR studio for a special episode of The VR Download this week, embedded above!
UploadVR People’s Choice Award For CES 2020: The Nominees
The votes are in and the winner of our People’s Choice Award for CES 2020 is NVIDIA’s new Variable Rate Supersampling feature. Just released this week for RTX GPUs, it will dynamically apply up to 8x supersampling in the center of the view only, the area you usually look at the most in VR, to improve fidelity. It’s sort of like the inverse of foveated rendering, which downgrades the quality of the areas in your peripheral vision to allow for a sharper center.
At CES 2020 the company that impressed us the most in terms of the technology feeling groundbreaking and truly impactful for the future of the VR/AR landscape, was definitely HaptX. Their haptic feedback gloves worked great and the telepresence robot demo was surprisingly articulated. It will be a long time before this technology is consumer-ready, but the future looks bright for haptics (and HaptX) in VR.
At CES 2020 this week, VRgineers announced a new version of its XTAL high-end headset for enterprise priced at $7,890, including business grade support.
The original XTAL was announced back in summer 2018. For $5,800 it featured dual 1440p OLED panels, 70Hz refresh rate, custom lenses with 180° field of view, eye tracking for automatic IPD, and built in Leap Motion controller-free hand tracking.
This new XTAL ditches OLED for dual 4K LCD displays instead. While VRgineers calls this “8K” (just like Pimax does), it’s important to note that the industry definition of 8K is actually 4 times as many pixels than 4K, not twice. This is because you need to multiply both axis of resolution. Hopefully VR companies stop using misleading terminology for the sake of marketing in future.
For more information read here or watch the interview and demo above.
At CES 2020 this week, VRgineers announced a new version of its XTAL high-end headset for enterprise priced at $7,890, including business grade support.
The original XTAL was announced back in summer 2018. For $5,800 it featured dual 1440p OLED panels, 70Hz refresh rate, custom lenses with 180° field of view, eye tracking for automatic IPD, and built in Leap Motion controller-free hand tracking.
This new XTAL ditches OLED for dual 4K LCD displays instead. While VRgineers calls this “8K” (just like Pimax does), it’s important to note that the industry definition of 8K is actually 4 times as many pixels than 4K, not twice. This is because you need to multiply both axis of resolution. Hopefully VR companies stop using misleading terminology for the sake of marketing in future.
Strangely, the new model doesn’t seem to be called XTAL 2 or even have a different name, with VRgineers simply referring to it as the “latest generation of XTAL”.
The eye tracking has been upgraded to now support foveated rendering. The human eye is only high resolution in the very center. Notice as you look around your room that only what you’re directly looking at is in high detail. You aren’t able to read text that you aren’t pointing your eyes at directly. In fact, that “foveal area” is just 3 degrees wide. Advanced VR headsets can take advantage of this by only rendering where you’re directly looking (the foveal area) in high resolution. Everything else (the peripheral area) can be rendered at a significantly lower resolution. This is how XTAL can have 16 million pixels and still be usable by existing high-end GPUs.
To actually carry the display signal from the GPU to the headset, the new XTAL uses VirtualLink, the USB-C single cable standard for future VR headsets and the GPUs/laptops they connect to. VirtualLink hasn’t yet seen adoption in the consumer market.
So just how realistic of an image does dual 4K panels provide? The original XTAL is already being used by the USAF for pilot training, and Vance Air Force Base will be using the new XTAL. “The feeling that I got while flying the F18A in full VR mode in XTAL is really astonishing. It was so close to reality that I felt I was inside the F18A.” said Capt. Taimeir, a former F18 pilot from the Swiss Airforce, CEO of Mirage Technologies. The simulation rig it’s used in (which we tried at CES, more on that soon) costs $50,000.
VRgineers is also working with the US Navy to develop a next generation simulator, as well as “major national aircraft simulators and leading global automobile manufacturers”.
Like the original XTAL, the new headset supports a range of tracking systems via add-ons, including SteamVR and OptiTrack.
Interestingly, it also supports an addon module for mixed reality. We haven’t seen any details of this or tried it yet, but we’re interested to see how it compares to Varjo’s approach at the same concept.
Finally, the company intends to release a software update in the next few months for both the original and new headsets to improve the lens distortion matrix. This is likely intended to address complaints of warping on the edges of the lenses.
This week at CES 2020, VRgineers, makers of the enterprise-focused XTAL headset, plan to debut the latest version of their ultrawide FOV headset which will use a 4K display for each eye, which the company calls “8K,” and bring improved lenses and a video passthrough add-on.
VRgineers introduced their ultrawide XTAL headset two years ago and have been regularly tweaking it with improvements since then. The latest version of the headset, which the company says will debut this week at CES 2020, will bring “significantly better picture quality and readability.”
That’s thanks to new high resolution LCD displays which offer 4K resolution per-eye, which the company calls “8K.”
Quick note: We’re putting the “8K” in quotes because here it doesn’t refer to the same 8K that would come to mind for most of us when thinking of TVs or monitors. While the headset’s total horizontal resolution is claimed at 8K pixels, that’s split across each eye, meaning the effective resolution is 4K horizontally, and shorter vertically than you’d expect from an 8K TV resolution. We think this is confusing, so as with other headsets that use similar nomenclature, we put “8K” in quotes to help our readers understand that it’s being used differently than they might expect.
VRgineers says the new XTAL headset also has “improved lenses,” a pass-through video add-on for AR applications, and a version with a helmet-mount to attach the headset to helmets for simulator applications.
Image courtesy VRgineers
Aside from those changes, the latest XTAL appears to use the same hulking design and include the same features as earlier versions: a claimed 180 degree field of view, eye-tracking with automatic IPD adjustment, SteamVR Tracking, and Ultraleap hand-tracking. Ostensibly the newest version of the headset will be priced at the same €6,190 as the prior version, but we’re awaiting confirmation.
Alongside the news of their upgraded XTAL headset, VRgineers also says a software update planned for late Q1 will benefit the new and existing XTAL headsets with a “new warping algorithm with precise depth and size perception,” which will hopefully address the distortion issues we’ve seen consistently on XTAL headsets in the past.
