The road to better VR specs

4 min readMay 3, 2019

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see

Wow! I see a purple sky on the moon of Titan. OK, I know… this is not the real life. The resolution is too low, the image is too out of focus and there is something really heavy on my head. If this is the Matrix, then it’s a pretty lame one!

It’s just virtual reality in 2019.

The big players

The big players in the still small market are:

1) Facebook (Oculus)
2) HTC (Vive)
3) Microsoft (Mixed Reality)
4) Sony (Playstation VR)
5) Mobile VR (Google Daydream/Samsung Gear etc)

Together these headsets hold probably 99% of the current VR market. It contains headsets that work with your mobile like Google Daydream on the low end and the Rift and Vive Pro on the high-end.

The real competition is in the mid-range. Here is a fight going on between the new Vive Focus and the Oculus Quest. These competitors offer wireless headsets, 6 degrees of freedom and acceptable graphics for a reasonable price (below 500 Euro). This is exactly where the VR world is and should be going. New devices that are comfortable and easy to use for all. This is exciting, but to look at the future might be even more exciting.

Better specs

To see what kind of possibilities, we shouldn’t watch the mainstream VR, but look at some high-end small innovative companies. As benchmark, we take the Oculus Rift (first Developer Kit and current edition) as well as the HTC Vive.

Razer OSVR

Razer has similar specs to the Oculus rift with a refresh rate of 90Hz and a pixel density of 441PPI. It does offer something special. All its software is open source, so called OSVR. This projects aims to enable headsets and game controllers from all vendors to be used with any games.

Price: $399

Country: US

Fove

Fove has a normal OLED screen (2560x1440) with a slightly higher resolution of 506PPI. It has a field of view up to 100 degrees, but it has a trick at its sleeve. It uses an infrared eye tracking. This let you view objects with varying depths. Furthermore, the headset reduces the quality of the graphics that aren’t in the user’s gaze, providing better resolution to what the user is visually focusing on.

Price: $599

Country: Japan

Pimax 8K

Another Oculus competitor focuses on high resolution. The Pimax 8K. It uses 3,840 × 2,160 resolution per-eye. This leads to almost 800 PPI. Not only the PPI is high, but it has also a big field of view (FoV) of 200 degrees (80Hz).

Price: $899

Country: China

StarVR One XT

If your think that a field of view of 200 degrees is huge, think again. StarVR offers more than 210 degrees FoV. StarVR claims a “nearly 100% human viewing angle.” It has two screens 1,830 × 1,464 RGB-stripe per eye (90Hz). Star VR also uses eye-tracking technology.

Price: n/a (Expected around $2000)

Country: Taiwan

Varjo VR-1

This headset has two screens. One with high and another with very high resolution:

3,5 inch, 1920 × 1440 Pixel (686 PPI)

0,7 inch, 1920 × 1080 (3147 PPI)

At normal VR headsets when you focus on an object things getting out of focus. The VR-1 shows the small screen when you focus on and other part the regular screen. The focus is still in the middle, so no eye tracking is used like with the Vive Pro Eye or StarVR.

Price: $6000

Country: Finland

VRgineers XTAL

VRgineers is another high-end headset with offers a resolution of 5120 x 1440 pixels (2560 x 1440 per eye / 518 PPI) with two oled screens and a FoV of 180 degrees. XTAL also builds Leap Motion’s hand-tracking module directly into the headset, enabling hand-tracking in a 180 × 180 degree area, central to the direction the headset is facing.

Price: $5,800

Country: Czech republic