DATA CENTRE
and Oculus, two of the leading manufacturers have targeted businesses with versions of their headsets. Broadcast VR should also prove to be very popular. California-based NextVR has been experimenting with broadcasting live events for VR, including NBA basketball, tennis, concerts and other live events via an OTT app that sits on various VR platforms. Viewers can choose different VR camera angles (or are automatically switched between them) providing an experience that is considerably more immersive than traditional television. With all the investment going on in VR technology, many advancements are just on the horizon that will make VR even more enticing for consumers. HTC demonstrated the next iteration of its Vive VR headset line, the Vive Pro, at CES earlier this year. It sports many improvements over the old Vive headset by matching features seen in recently released headsets from other companies, such as integrated 3D noise-cancelling onear headphones and an adjustable head strap with sizing dial. Importantly, the new headset increases resolution from 1080 x 1200 to 1440 x 1600 pixels per eye, or PPE, with the same 110 degree field of view, or FOV, and 90 Hz refresh rate as the old Vive headset. In testing the unit, the screen door effect was much less pronounced than in the old headset, but was still slightly visible. The immediate benefit of the reduced screen door effect was that it made onscreen text in VR a
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lot more legible, increasing its usability. The increased resolution not only helped to increase immersion in entertainment related VR applications, but it also furthers goals of developing VR-based productivity suites, computer interfaces and other applications where text may be needed to convey information. Finnish startup Varjo has also been demonstrating its Alpha prototype headset, targeted at the enterprise market. The headset, still in development, utilises organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, microdisplays and specialised two-way mirrors and lenses to create a highly focused and detailed section at the centre of the screen. Combined with a traditional OLED screen filling in the rest of the image, the system is meant to mimic the human eye, where the periphery of our vision is blurry and the centre highly focused and detailed. Within the highly focused section, the screen door effect experienced on other VR headsets is nowhere to be seen, with small dials, gauges and text easily readable. Outside of that middle section, resolution for the rest of the screen is the same as the new HTC Vive Pro. It is hard to understate the difference between the Varjo headset and Vive Pro as the Varjo headset easily leapfrogs the Vive Pro in terms of visual fidelity. The Vive Pro, despite its resolution increase from the original Vive headset, still displays a noticeable screen door effect. Varjo’s advantage comes with a price though, as its headsets will most likely sell for $5,000 or more. Varjo, with the belief that enterprises will pay that much for a top-of-the-line headset, has generated immense interest from content companies and large enterprises. According to the company, one particular area of interest from companies like BMW, Airbus, Volkswagen and Audi is to utilise the headsets for VR computer aided design, or CAD, applications to aid with product design. In VR, being able to see life-size versions of your 3D model as you are designing and making changes is invaluable, cutting prototyping costs and saving time. Varjo expects to be shipping its finished product in early 2019. Kopin, a company that manufacturers OLED and liquid crystal display, or LCD, microdisplays intended for the augmented reality, or AR, and VR markets has also been demonstrating next-generation VR technology at various trade shows. Kopin’s Elf VR reference design kit, or RDK, utilises OLED microdisplays instead of larger OLED and LCD screens often meant for the smartphone market. Microdisplays are miniature displays, often smaller than a postage stamp, mounted on a silicon chipset with other necessary display components. The OLED microdisplays in the Elf RDK from Kopin have a higher refresh rate (120 Hz) and higher pixel density (2,940 pixels per inch, or PPI) than the current displays in headsets on the market, such as the HTC Vive Pro, which has a refresh rate of 90 Hz with 615 PPI. While demoing the reference design unit, the increased pixel density made the screen door effect completely disappear, eliminating one of the more a nnoying aspects of VR. More importantly though, the microdisplays enable a form factor for VR headsets that is orders of magnitude smaller and lighter, making the headset itself more congruous to longer gaming/entertainment sessions. Besides Kopin, other OLED microdisplay manufacturers include eMagin, OLiGHTEK, Sony and MicroOLED. Top VR headset manufacturers currently have microdisplay RDKs and we could conceivably see VR headsets with the technology as soon as early 2019. n