Starbreeze, a Swedish games and software entertainment company, has announced it will partner with Taiwan-based electronics firm Acer to design, produce and bring to market the StarVR virtual reality (VR) headset with an ambitious 210 degree field of view (FOV).
Announced a year ago at Electronic Expo 2015 in Los Angeles, the StarVR headset is one of the only VR headsets in development by a company that primarily builds, develops and sells computer workstations, so it will be interesting to watch.
Facebook, a company that doesn’t produce hardware, made its first major investment into electronics/hardware when it bought virtual reality technology company Oculus for $2 billion. HTC primarily built smartphones before betting big on the Vive headset. Samsung is probably the closest comparison to Acer, developing and producing computer components as well as hundreds of millions of smartphones.
It’s interesting to note that other workstation giants such as Lenovo, HP and Dell have not (yet) jumped into the VR space. Another interesting fact that may contribute to the joint venture is that Acer hasn’t seen any growth since 2010, but it has a cash surplus of $1.2 billion. If virtual reality and augmented reality are indeed the next huge platform shift, as industry analysts such as Digi-Capital claim, Acer’s bet on Starbreeze and the StarVR headset may pay off.
One of the main factors that prevents people from purchasing VR headsets is the cost. For example, the analogous workstation and hardware upgrades can add $2,000 or more to the initial cost of HTC Vive ($799) or Oculus Rift ($599). As an alternative, you could always purchase the Google Cardboard viewer for 15 bucks, but the experience is not nearly as immersive as that offered by HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. We’ll see if Google jumps into Oculus and HTC territory this week at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, where the company announces new software and hardware.
As the supplementary hardware designed to facilitate home VR experiences becomes more ubiquitous, perhaps more efficient hardware will gravitate away from GPU components that fit in workstations. That’s just speculation. Realistically, if you look closely at what Starbreeze and Acer are proposing to build in the StarVR headset, you’ll see that when it comes to market, it’s going to require some serious graphics processing. There will almost certainly be an option to bundle it with an Acer VR-ready workstation.
The need for more powerful hardware to power the StarVR is apparent because the headset is so ambitious. The horizontal (210 degrees) and vertical (130 degrees) FOV are almost double that of its intended rivals, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. This also means that the FOV will be nearer to that of a person’s normal vision range. And the 5.5-inch Quad HD displays have extremely high resolution at 5120 x 1440 compared to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, which have 2160 x 1200 resolution.
The fact that it will require even more expensive hardware to run at home means that this headset will probably be aimed more at event spaces for media and entertainment. The company has already produced a virtual reality experience for The Walking Dead.
Though the explosion in VR content will continue throughout this year, it seems fair to surmise that this partnership between Acer and Starbreeze is an attempt to produce a more high-end VR product for high-end markets, in the hope that they can provide the best-quality headset for emerging and immersive new VR content—and also bundle it with a VR-ready workstation … from Acer.