It’s now fairly unusual for us to attend big shows like E3 without seeing another mobile smartphone VR viewer pop up. As the processing power and 3D rendering capabilities of average smart phones has exploded these days, and that many include IMUs capable of detecting (or approximating well at least) orientation. Leveraging that cutting-edge technology to ride the current frenzy in the VR space means we have many more mobile viewer solutions than fully-fledged, dedicated VR Headsets.
CMoar is very similar to products like Durovis Dive and Vrase in that you get a case with lenses, you start up a compatible application, slot in your smart phone and away you go. CMoar does deviate in one area though, and it’s a potentially interesting one. The Cmoar comes with 3 distinct lens assemblies (or ‘bases’ as CMoar call them) for 3 different types of applications: 2D Cinema, 3D Stereoscopic Cinema and an VR / AR ‘base’.
If you want to watch a movie or game on a virtual big screen but your movie is not in 3D, use the 2D Cinema base (single, fresnel lense for both eyes). For 3D enabled applications and movies (side by side stereoscopic) pick the 3D cinema base with dual fresnels. Finally, VR / AR lenses which, they claim, yield a 95 degree FOV.
The unit is a fairly neat bit of industrial design, if somewhat bulky. Rather than having a separate carrying case, the device forms a complete shell when all pieces are assembled, meaning you can throw them in a bag when you go travelling. But (as you’ll see in the pitch video we filmed at Cmoar’s stand), the design has lead to a fairly bulky headset. Furthermore, the process for both inserting your smartphone into the device (Cmoar claim compatibility with 30 devices) and swapping out the lens bases looks a little clunky and cumbersome to me, but this is still a prototype product at this point.
Cmoar is heading to Kickstarter soon and we’ll have some impressions of the unit up on the site soon.