Earlier this year, Finnish company Varjo launched a headset with a price tag of $5,995. That may sound hefty to your average Joe, but this headset is not aimed at consumers – it’s an enterprise tool.
“This is something that was done with the professionals, for the professionals,” Varjo CMO Jussi Mäkinen told Wired. “It’s not a consumer product retrofit for the professional market.”
VR-1: the only human-eye resolution headset.
Varjo
Varjo’s Bionic Display™ delivers an unprecedented resolution of 60 pixels per degree – the equivalent of 20/20 vision. This means you can read text, just as you would in the real world. Colors, contours, textures, and illuminations appear just as they should. The clarity ensures that professionals who work in fields that need extreme precision and detail – e.g. engineers, architects, and designers – can use VR.
The Tulip: a new public cultural and tourist attraction proposed for the City of London is designed by Foster + Partners. The company was a Varjo early access partner for VR-1.
Foster + Partners
With integration to industry-specific engines such as Unreal, Unity, Autodesk VRED, and Prepar3D, you can experience and evaluate prototypes in immense detail and design and train in a completely realistic VR environment.
Varjo VR-1 used together with Autodesk VRED enables automotive designers and digital marketers to create and present product renderings and virtual prototypes in human-eye resolution.
Varjo
In addition to its high resolution, VR-1 includes custom made stereo eye-tracking technology. Designed by Varjo’s engineers and optical design team, it works by reflecting images onto the eye and tracking them algorithmically. The 20/20 Eye Tracker™ allows access to valuable data which can be used in research, industrial design, training, and more.
Immersed.io
Varjo says that using the device will “radically shorten design time cycles” as well as “make training more effective in realistic immersive environments.” The company is already working with Airbus, Saab, Volvo, and Volkswagen, among others.
If $6K can drive efficiencies in business and ultimately cut costs, then the investment is arguably worth every dollar.
For businesses that want to use virtual reality, but don’t have the budget available to invest in a VR-1 headset, HP’s Reverb Professional Edition offers a much cheaper option at $649 – a tenth of the price. It doesn’t deliver 20/20 vision in VR or have eye tracking, but it does beat many of the mainstream headsets on resolution. The HP Reverb has 2160×2160 resolution per eye and a 114° field of view (which is a larger field of view than the VR-1). You can read more about the Reverb here.
It’s clear HP has done its homework with Reverb – it’s created a headset that solves three specific pain points commonly associated with VR solutions: superb visual quality, smarter fit and comfort, especially during extended usage for intense workflows; and, worry-free deployment and support.
HP
VR is already a valuable business tool, used in a number of diverse industries – from aerospace to architecture. Now, with headsets like VR-1 and Reverb, the clarity of experience is getting better and better – virtual reality will continue to change the face of enterprise.