StarVR

[iBSOD]

I've never been lucky enough to try the vive or rift, but looking at the specs the resolution seems pretty low, considering its covering most of your vision.

Both have a total resolution of 2160x1200, or 1080x1200 per eye.

StarVR has a res of 5120x1440, or 2560x1440 per eye, with 210 degree FOV . This sounds far more immersive.

The consumer release is probably very far away but I thought I'd share this since I've never seen anyone mention it before.

Care to share thoughts on this?

 

[AllBodies]

Seems like it's mainly targeted at VR films.

And I'm assuming it's highly expensive. Since neither Oculus nor HTC went for anything like this, I'm guess there are major drawbacks.

These are likely; cost, latency/persistence of the screens, weight, and install base which could power it for real-time rendering.

 

[andybird123]

Why would it be aimed at movies?

The company behind this are opening StarCades where you can try this headset, they are at least another year from any kind of consumer release, and you can bet that Oculus etc will be targeting higher resolution and FOV for their gen2 stuff so it remains to be seen where/if this will fit in the market considering content is probably going to be their main issue

 

[ryryryan]

That resolution would probably require minimum 980Ti too. I think this is too far ahead of its time to really succeed in the immediate future.

 

[Rilot]

I've been following the development of this one. The 210 degree FOV will be incredible.

 

[sgavan]

Are they aiming this at consumers? or just corporate/industry as the specs might mean only they can afford it.

 

[xyphic]

Will require a beast of a PC to run anything but the simplest of games. Around 3x the number of pixels as the Rift/Vive, so you'd be looking at dual 980Ti configuration at least. I'd say that it'll be ~2 years before mainstream PCs are powerful enough to cope, which'll be around the same time as Rift/Vive release their second generation headsets.

Virtual cinema is most definitely a target for VR headset manufacturers. 3DTV never really took off because the limited FOV you get from a small television reduces the 3D effect, and it generally isn't worth the effort of dusting off your glasses. Virtual cinema will project something that *effectively* looks the same size as a cinema (or IMAX) screen, so you can view 2D or 3D movies as they were intended. Unfortunately, current gen headsets only give you equivalent resolution as 480p or so, so detail is limited. The increased resolution of the StarVR headset would give you a larger effective resolution of the virtual screen. The increased FOV should allow projection of IMAX sized screens.

 

[AllBodies]

My suspicion it's targeted more at film is in part because their tech-demo is a film experience, and it's the same amount of pixels as 4K so there's next to no install base who have the hardware to run games on it (or afford it, since it'll clearly be £1000+).

But mostly because they mention nothing about OLED low-persistence, or the refresh-rate.

To stop motion sickness in gaming experiences you need to have 90 FPS/Hz or more, and low-persistence panels (which means you need OLED)

 

[BassPunk]

Its using eye tracking for foveated rendering so wont need to render the whole image at full resolution, only where the eye is looking. SMI's technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq09BTmjzRs is similar to how this headset will work.

 

[andybird123]

My suspicion it's targeted more at film is in part because their tech-demo is a film experience, and it's the same amount of pixels as 4K so there's next to no install base who have the hardware to run games on it (or afford it, since it'll clearly be £1000+).

But mostly because they mention nothing about OLED low-persistence, or the refresh-rate.

To stop motion sickness in gaming experiences you need to have 90 FPS/Hz or more, and low-persistence panels (which means you need OLED)

That is all because they are a year+ away from announcing a consumer product