Starbreeze Studios, a videogame publisher which recently entered the VR arena with their StarVR headset, announced that they’ll be opening a VR arcade venue in Los Angeles, CA called Project StarCade. The goal of the venue is to “make premium VR experiences accessible for the masses” and showcase the company’s VR headset.
Revealed last June at E3 2015, the StarVR headset is notable for its impressively wide 210 degree field of view and whopping 5120×1440 resolution, achieved with dual displays and some intense Fresnel lenses. The headset was shown off at the show with a zombie-blasting experience based on Overkill’s The Walking Dead.
With the headset still in development and no word on concrete plans to mass-produce the device, Starbreeze Studios has announced they’ll be opening a VR arcade venue in Los Angeles, CA to give a broader audience a chance to try the headset. ‘Project StarCade’, as they’re calling it, will open in the spring/summer timeframe in an undisclosed “prime location,” according to the company.
Project StarCade will feature Overkill’s The Walking Dead VR experience and the company says they’re working on a “catalogue of experiences” for the headset, and are also open to working with other companies interested in developing titles for the headset.
Road to VR’s Senior Editor Paul James went hands-on with the StarVR headset back at E3 2015:
Sitting down and donning StarVR and headphones, I’m immediately reminded of what impressed me so much back in 2013 when I visited the InfinitEye team in Toulouse, France. Your peripheral vision is, for all intents and purposes, entirely enveloped in the virtual world. The combination of StarVR’s gargantuan 210 degree horizontal and 135 degree vertical field of view really wraps your brain in a panoramic VR experience. This is StarVR’s killer unique selling point and it’s beyond anything you’ve tried before.
StarVR’s other main strength is of course its dual Quad HD panels, which delivers 2560 x 1440 pixels to each eye, that’s a staggering 5k horizontal resolution. The result? No appreciable screendoor effect whatsoever, something that bizarrely takes a little getting used to at first.
We’re looking forward to seeing continued development of the StarVR headset which, while impressive, had a few areas that could still use polish. The optically-tracked version we saw at E3 left something to be desired, though the company has said they are investigating integration of Valve’s ‘Lighthouse’ tracking system which has been shown to be robust and deliver high performance tracking.
