Acer has announced its plans to release a VR device in the first half of this year. While Acer is staying mum on the details, we could be seeing prototypes at next week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
Acer CEO Jason Chen told reporters on Tuesday that the company “has been conducting research and development of VR technologies for a while,” and that the Taiwanese tech giant would be “planning to introduce some new technologies to surprise everyone,” reports Taipei Times.
“We are thinking of how to expand Acer’s reach in the field and turn our VR technologies into a business. And that is an important element in the process of Acer’s corporate transformation,” Chen said.
According to a report from PocketNow, Acer has been rumored to be showing prototypes at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Road to VR will be attending MWC 2016 with hopes of seeing if the rumors pan out, and just what sort of mysterious VR device—headset or otherwise—Acer has been developing.
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Making a competitive VR headset nowadays isn’t as easy as slapping a smartphone in a plastic holder with lenses anymore. Large hardware manufacturers Like Samsung and HTC have included virtual reality in their next growth strategy for some time, and in a bid to stay competitive they’ve started to retool their manufacturing processes to make way for custom-built parts like VR-specific displays and ultra-sensitive IMUs capable of sub 20 millisecond latency. Now with VR clearly out of the niche sector and headed straight into the factories of tech giants like Acer, we’ll be interested to see just what the big boys of global manufacturing are going to pull out of their R&D labs.
Check back with us this week as we cover the rumored Acer prototypes and all the latest AR/VR news to come out of MWC 2016.