It’s been a turbulent 48 hours in VR – in particular for the company that claimed to have the world’s first 4k, UHD VR Headset in development.
We broke the story that a new website had popped up, purportedly by a new company on the VR scene, Horizon VR. The website confidently claimed that they had developed and was to imminently ship a dual 4k, fresnel lense HMD with an impressive 210 degrees field of view. The website offered pre-orders for the HMD starting at $399 as a deposit, due to ship in January 2015 via Paypal and Bitcoin.
However, the company had chosen to use a concept render lifted directly from InfinitEye and their facts seemed inconsistent plus their target ship date enormously optimistic.
Road to VR got in touch with CEO Kevin Geiger who claimed that the website had gone live by mistake, the result of an over enthusiastic relative of the owner, and had been inundated with order, claiming up to 500 as of yesterday.
After the story broke, the VR community were in uproar and at the advice of Road to VR, Kevin Geiger posted an apologetic post on the subreddit /r/oculus attempting to quell the anger. Unfortunately, it made things worse and when pre-order functionality was not taken down at our suggestion suspicion grew. After a flurry of information dug up by the VR Community by Tuesday’s close, Horizon VR were the target of even more distrust.
It now looks as if Horizon has finally done the sensible thing and taken their website offline, hopefully to resolve questions and issues with the information within. The website reads, at the time of writing, simply:
At the request of the VR community, all advertising and pre-orders for the V have been stopped until further notice. Horizon VR
So, what now? What happens to the 500 reported pre-orders Kevin Geiger claimed they’d received? Is Horizon VR the real deal, simply suffering a catastrophic series of admin and PR errors? At this point we simply don’t know.
There’s no doubt that Horizon VR have made an appalling first impression, if indeed they are a legitimate operation. However, for what it’s worth we really hope that Horizon VR turn out to be the read deal. Seeing such a fantastically specified HMD on the market and in the person would have been quite something.
We’ll try to find Horizon VR’s current position and their future plans, including that pressing question of potential refunds for current pre-order owners.
