Ok, going to see if I can order one too. Might be a bit difficult since I don’t own a company in any of the delivery countries, but going to see if it’s possible to use my cargo forwarder in miami
EDIT
Thank you for your order.
We will send you an email with order confirmation and payment instructions soon.
First step ok but hopefully they’re not going to ask too many questions 
Update, if anyone is contemplating doing the same: today got an email from Varjo with payment link, I just paid it, still no questions asked I Imagine that if they wanted to research into their client, if they’re ‘suitable’ for their headsets (like StarVR does), that they’d asked questions first. So it seems that anyone can buy the headset … Fingers crossed
That’s great to hear, so it was $3k or €3k plus $900 per year or something like that?
I’d love to see a comparison with the 8KX and some through the lense photos if possible.
It’d be interesting to see and hear your review just how high res those fused displays in the middle are.
Not fused just layered as similar to Nvidia Cascaded displays paper released years ago. Current implementation is more of a hardware ffr of sorts.
The yearly cost is annoying though. Hopefully that is just for tech support vs losing headset function.
The prices with every generation have been coming down quite a lot though. I think the V2 or V1 cost $5 or $6k? Maybe in a few years they’ll release a consumer headset with no yearly service price tag?
I think CREAL is aiming to enter the consumer market as well this/next year going by their development timeline shown at CES this year.
What we need for this to be much better is a standard background display as used with the focused display being a custom 1:1 round vs 2 rectangles. Put that into a WFoV headset and likely have gold.
CREAL is doing some interesting light field tech to basically achieve a type of varifocal display, and possibly some display layering as well if I’m not mistaken.
Did you purchase from the Varjo Store directly? Did you get the VR-3 or the XR-3? Did you just order the HMD or the yearly subscription as well?
bestware are expecting the VR-3 inbound next week, so I should have it pretty soon. Not sure yet at what point I’ll have to purchase the subsricption yet, probably once I actually want to start using it.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean? Is it like a layered wide fov display and a pixel dense centre displays like Pimax and Varjo technology put together? or you mean like I suggested with what Wearality and index does by using scaled up lenses and scaled up displays to give us 150+ perceived fov with 1:1 aspect ratio displays and 120 fov lenses, with the same rendering techniques and requirements we currently use in vive or oculus headsets?
Or you mean actually round displays to reduce rendering requirements instead of square or rectangular ones?
A rectangular display if you watched Mike’s review while good he said you could notice the transition of the focused display to the lower res display(edge) at times.
By using a round display panel it can be more natural to the eye with potentially less noticeable edge detection as the focus display center can be aligned with the pupil when looking straight. The distance around the center of view.
Much like how with ffr you have I believe 3 kinds that vary how big the focused rendered window is.
Do you think Pimax could actually do what Varjo is doing? I’m curious why no one else is/has tried it.
Maybe it would be easier for them to do a Pimax 4k styled super headset or something like that with 150 fov, a mix of the index and the lockheed martin headset. they might just need to scale up regular lenses and displays in size to do it
The pimax wide fov lense is somewhat kind of rectangular with the core view using round lenses and the peripheral is flat. A round focused display would concentrate center of round or main viewport with the outer edge of the round being lower res along with peripheral where you would need to strain the eyes to look at that part of the lense.
So maybe for example a 2.5k Qhd panel like the 5k with a focused round 2k panel for core view.
That is maybe a simpler answer. Could pimax theoretically do it? Sure along with anyone else.
However there are those pesky patents. Nvidia with there cascaded displays and varjo and others with there application versions.
Varjo for example likely didn’t need to license Nvidia Cascaded Displays as there application maybe significantly different using 2 different size and res displays. Where Nvidia’s application used 2 identical displays offset? To improve latency and sharpness by pixel density.
So the idea is already binded so to speak.
If it’s a design patent in question, you could just change the design slightly - for example by using oval displays instead of circular ones, to avoid infringement.
If it’s a utility patent then there would have to be some fundamental changes in implementation in order for there to be no intellectual property infringement. I wouldn’t expect a big company to dish out money for anything less than a utility patent.
The same goes for wearalirys headset the lense is patented, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be reverse engineered and implemented differently to achieve a similar or the same result.
You would think it is that simple. Priority One was sued by another Palletier company on how a product was turned and a couple of other ideas like using a lift to raise and lower the skid vs raising and lowering layer build surface.
Depending on how the wording and what is patented can make copying a design idea hard.
Sony for example was I believe sued for Rumbling effect in controllers and rekeased Sixaxis controller without rumble. But later re-released Dualshock after coming to an agreement of licensing the tech.
With this it is better to either have good opensourced hardware or pay a licensing fee to avoid losing one’s shirt.
Yeah from Varjo directly. The VR-3 indeed. HMD + 1 year subscription since that seems mandatary. Although I just paid $3195 so that still doesn’t seem to included the subscription. I did get a separate email that the subscription will start soon though, although it mentions a date of 31 may. I guess I’ll get billed by then. The yearly fee of course s*cks, but if this headset is really as good as the specs seem to be, I think it might be worth it.
Yeah, $5000-$6000 really is a business price. The current $3100 price tag is much more prosumer priced already, although with the $795 yearly fee it’s of course still very expensive … I’m sure that without that yearly fee they would reach a lot more prosumers
Changing the organisational structure of something works when you’re trying to reverse engineer a design patent or a trademark.
Trademarks cast a very broad net, they’re not specific to wording but because trademarks deal with imagery “similar enough” is enough for a potential claim. That’s why apple sues any fruit related companies just for having fruit as a logo, because any fruit is “similar enough” in the wide net cast by apples trademark
For example, I can make a design patent on a recipe for food or a burger, but I can’t make a utility patent for the concept of burgers themselves. Changing the organisational structure and ingredients slightly is enough for avoiding liability when it comes to design patents and even trademark intellectual property disputes.
With respect to VR, trademarks on a certain style of headset are not very strong (because many other similar designed headsets exist, so it would not be like a trademark dispute on fruit imagery when it comes to apples trademark), and neither are design patents. It’s the patenting of a certain concept that has the most strength.
The more money a company has the more they can control the flow of technology with IT Patents.
Patents were in place to protect ideas from being copied by another whom could make and sell for less.
Now it is more those big companies can patent everything under the sun whether they plan to use it or not. At least closed patents.
Most small companies/individuals would fold with just going through the legal rollercoaster ride alone.
In fact you could argue that the whole concept of patenting is a kind of machine to have middle class workers invent ideas that can be bought out by the rich and wealthy to never see the light of day.
It’s sad that anti-trust practices which lead to bill gates being sued (repackaging qDOS as MS-DOS and forcing people to buy MS-DOS in order to install windows) is now a commonly accepted practice (quest 2 Facebook login requirement)
I have the greatest respect for freeware and decentralised technologies like the newer web 3.0 blockchain IPFS implementations of older DNS technologies which have proprietary platforms built into them, for that reason.
