Having watched the movie “Ready Player One”, I decied to buy a PS4 headset and that’s 2 years ago. But the user experience is not as good as seen in the movie. The heaset is heavy, hard to adjust and causes dizziness after long period of wearing.
Looking at the current market headset, it inspires me to try new headset again!
For VR use cases, gaming is the most popular market.
Oculus quest 2 is no double the most attractive one. Single Fast-Switch LCD, 1832×1920px per eye makes the images presented to user more real. Qualcomm® Snapdragon XR2 CPU provides a solid computation power for rendering and processing.
Valve Index which has 1440×1600 LCD panel for each eye. Leveraging the PC end computational power, and backed by the steam platform, Valve delivers great gaming experience for end users. It have greater market compared to oculus.
There are massive use cases in engineering heaset which leaverages AR/MR.
Microsoft Hololens2 is getting very hot with real time enviormental data processing captured by sensors and rich communication capability via wireless.
From industrial application pespective, there is a headset we have to mention:
RealWear HMT-1Z1: I specially pick this headset as I have rich experience working with it. The headset is voice trigged thus it frees operators hands in crucial working enviornment.
The power of AR/VR/MR is not to say of a bright future. There was bubble period where VR was over priced and there were few successful stories. However now AR/VR is getting real useful again as the market is appreciating the benefit AR/VR can bring. The AR/VR headset design is innovating accoridng the following 3 aspects:
User comfortness/experience: The desnsity of chips in a headset increased significantly. The increasing computational power makes the headset lighter and user can make head movement easier. Technology tracking eyeball movement makes it easier to present images more real and ease the tiredness of the eyes.
Application: Either comsumer or industrial user now tend to use the single headset to perform multiple and complicated workload. Market palce with more quality applications attacts more users.
Eco-system: With enterprise and industrial leads, how the headset performs best relies on the software vendors who can deliver the most suitable applicaiton in the right scenarios. Thus it’s a history of hardware and software vendors working together.