Yeah they have gone that way. Doing premature interviews, talking like they’re experts when the product isn’t out yet. Over promising and under delivering. Delay delay delay.
Maybe Somnium will get the VR-1 out in the next 2-3 months but the price is my biggest concern and that won’t change unless labour costs change.
The VR-1 will sell less than the Crystal imo and Pimax are hanging on by their finger nails.
I will go as far as already declaring the VR1 dead. THE big selling point for this thing was the optical stack. Now that they messed that up, why would anyone buy this thing?
They just should replace it with pancake, now THEN they’d have my interest. But of course that’s not going to happen, they’re way too far into the process already.
But really, someone should just release an AVP competitor, with similar visual fidelity, even a bit more FoV. It would sell like hot cakes.
Knowing Apple, the chances of getting that optical stack for others is likely slim for a decent period.
This, maybe… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uctiOeR1nEo
( As for their omnidirectional treadmill; I presume it works much like omniwheels; Rotate all the rows of rollers in the same direction to move in X, and counterrotate odd and even rows, to make you go on the Y axis, on the (EDIT: …diagonally inset…) sub-rollers… )
I am sure some companies like Google will come out with an Android version of AVP. It’s just a matter of time. I could never have AVP because i dislike its ecosystem.
I hope so, sooner than later. Apple was late to the party but in a way they beat everybody else. Well Meta’s Quest 3 is of course also a huge success but that’s entry level. In the high-end there’s simply nothing that’s as good in terms of visual fidelity, if we have to believe the reviews.
Samsung/Google really need to ask themselves what the f*ck happened … Or maybe they needed Apple to open the door and have the main stream interested.
Yeah, turn VR into a fashion accessory. lol
Haha well that actually kinda is what’s happened. They made it fashionable. Kind of sad that this is what it took, lol, but oh well
It’s only a matter of time before low hanging Youtubers are replaced by minor Z lister celebrities, then A listers and eventually Royalty. Not to be out done we’ll then have Redbull extreme sports people do anything from wing suiting to deepest sea free diving. There’ll be a whole new catagory of world record, anything dumb done in an Apple headset.
The thought did strike me, the other day, that given we used to have even experienced VR users forgetting themselves, and leaning with all their weight against virtual furniture; If people were to perfectly naturally become even more distracted, in their wearing the devices out in the wild, and in daily life (as opposed to in a safe, and clearly delineated home environment), and with realistically rendered objects mixed into it, maybe it’s for the best that the company discourages any notions of VR, and insists on first and formost pushing the ipad-on-your-head paradigm. Liabilites abound. 
Argueably, on the late-to-the-party-but-beating-the-competition-to-the-punch-(bowl) matter; No matter how many of Apple’s engineers might themselves possibly have had reservations about the readiness of the product, the timing may very well be masterful…
Their leveraging the affluency and show-off-ish tendencies of a probably not insignificant part of their userbase, does afford them to splurge on things that many others have long been waiting to become both available, and more affordable, no matter how much some of those others may have been employing the tactic of selling as a loss leader.
There are a fair few things that are passing sufficiency thresholds and coming together, at the moment, and Apple can rightfully claim to be the first to present them in a “synergistically put together package” (Yeah! -Buzzwords! :P), even where maybe some smaller player have already launched something with similar optics or display panels; Or half-baked UI overlay systems; Or a sometimes-working hacked-together-injected-foveated-rendering-solution; Or passthrough that is maybe still superior, but more expensive yet. :7
Any further news on VR1?
Starting to remind me of the Lynx, too late in the day with numerous issues that haven’t been resolved, pretty much DOA
I have no doubt that Google’s new XR fork of Android will quickly become dominant alongside Apple. Google’s European HQ is near my house, I’ve done numerous paid research sessions with them over the past 6 years and despite their tight lips I’ve managed to eek out snippets of information that informed me they never left XR space but continued to figure it out away from public gaze.
Nothing. Not even a date for Somnium connect.
Supposedly a blog post with lots of new info will be published today. Was already supposed to happen last week though.
Blog post, hot off the press:
Haha i love it how they take a swing at the crystal ‘not hard to beat’ LOL. And awesome to see that they’re inviting the Youtubers once again. Let’s see what they think, looking forward to that
My biggest takeaway from this update is this…
136FoV is a huge jump imo. That would make it a much more desirable HMD given the price.
Even still the base model has no pass through or come with controllers or audio.
As a headset on its own it looks like a great headset and I wish Somnium great success as I do Pimax and Varjo. All of them seem to avoid making the headset people are asking for.
The wait continues.
That´s it! Whoever tells them about the target group, is blocking VR. Like always “mother knows best”…
Still there is no improvement that would convicne me to pay for. Currently only side-steps (Crystal) and partially back-steps.
Well hopefully they don’t end up like StarVR who also made light of pimax
It would be good if they were aiming for a better price point
But like you said get the 
out and enjoy the show. 
Hopefully they can achieve this. As imho this would be a sweet spot to hit. especially with the form factor and not using canting.
The Render controls also look good. Though they do confirm there is variance in quality by promoting you can choose different distortion profiles.
