Facebook Connect is certainly the marquee VR event this month, but it looks like other companies are hoping to steal a bit of the spotlight. First HTC teased an upcoming product to be revealed next week, and now high-end headset marker Varjo says it plans to unveil its “most highly anticipated product release yet” on October 21st, just days before Facebook Connect on the 26th.
Varjo today announced an upcoming product reveal slated for October 21st. Details are extremely light at the moment, with the company teasing with phrases like “the time has come,” and “this is the one you’ve been waiting for.” And then there’s the ambitious claim that the announcement will “raise virtual reality to a whole new playing field.” You can register for the event here if you’d like to watch it stream live on the 21st at 12PM ET (your timezone here).
Varjo makes high-end enterprise headsets that make other enterprise headsets, like the $1,400 Vive Pro 2 look cheap by comparison. Despite the price, the company’s headsets really do deliver some unmatched features, like true retina resolution at the center of the display, precise eye-tracking with automatic IPD adjustment, best-in-class hand-tracking, and (for their flagship headset) full-color passthrough with a wide field-of-view.
Just a few months ago I went hands-on with the company’s latest flagship device, the XR-3 and came away feeling like the company is continuing to make its headsets better while at the same time making them cheaper. But they’re still far from affordable, even among enterprise headsets, with prices starting at $3,200 (+$800 annually).
If the company can continue the trend of offering its high-end features at lower and lower prices, it could start to see demand from the lower end of the enterprise market.
That would be great to see, if the company is announcing a new headset on the 21st, but that’s far from certain. Varjo has also been pursuing a range of interesting ideas based on the mixed reality capabilities of its headsets, like the recently announced ‘Varjo Reality Cloud’ which aims to ‘teleport’ users between real world spaces by using the headset to scan the room around them and then stream that space to others.
More recently the company teased an upcoming ‘real-time masking’ functionality for its mixed reality headsets which allows users to select portions of the real-world to bring into virtual reality experiences. In an example below they map out a steering wheel peripheral to be displayed inside of a VR racing game.
Ready to gain full control of the boundaries of #mixedreality? Take an early look at the real-time masking functionality included in the upcoming Varjo Lab Tools release. https://t.co/VWEKLSpfe0 #XR #AR pic.twitter.com/RkXmPWWMv5
— Varjo (@varjodotcom) October 6, 2021
Whether its hardware or software that the company plans to reveal on the 21st, they always seem to have something intriguing up their sleeves and we’ll be watching to see what’s next.
