StarVR One is EoL

So it looks like 3 years later and the device is now dead in the water I am not sure if the XT model will live on, however it does make me wonder if that means they are updating the displays at the very least to something more pixel dense or changing to lets say QD-OLED panels. I do hope that they will be able to release another headset but I am not sure what their cash flow is like. Have not seen too many dev studios or enterprises using the unit and it seems they def lost their edge compared to VRgineers and the VARJO hmds.

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they been dead for years. Acer broke up the relationship and a couple of developers swept up the leftovers. The HMDs sold were parts from development and a few one-offs. The StarVR never went into mass production.

very unfortunate actually

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Imho this was inevitable for a variety of reasons including low res wide fov. As @dstar mentions with Acer dissolving the dev team after all the associated scandals and issues at Starbreeze. Along with the clear competition at lower price and higher res of pimax and the higher priced better features of Xtal.

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yeah they definitely had an opportunity to release the device with a better fleshed out featureset, but I think even Acer could not salvage the operation at that point. I am waiting to get my test unit to see how it performs and hopefully I can gleam so more info on it personally.

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Iirc during the ks you were working on a test hmd along the lines of the 5k?

yes but it was just a test to see what was available and I was working on a shoestring budget. It is now shelved because the costs of getting proper controller boards that could drive the displays even at a now expected 90Hz was very difficult, the custom lens design at least stateside is absurdly expensive and at the time not many game engines played well with parallel projection that was needed for canted lenses. I still have it collecting dust somewhere in storage but realistically there is no market for such a device now that the Pimax 5K and the Vrgineers HMDs exist. Like I mentioned in the old topic I am more interested in working with DMDs that could be retina mapped than current display tech. It is a lot less eyestrain for the end user and because of its display tech can be easily made to work with simultaneous focal plane streaming. By sending something like 9 depth cues to the displays at the same time combined with 1000Hz eye tracking you can easily solve the vergence accommodation problem inherent in current HMDs while also improving immersion because the user can now easily focus on just about any object in their LoS at will. The best part is that you really only need the eye tracking to minimize the rendering of additional planes at the periphery.

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The great news is my StarVR unit has arrived, so hopefully I can run some tests this week.

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So my initial thoughts so far are that the headset is insanely light. The resolution is as to be expected not mind blowing I would say its a middle ground between the Quest 2 and HP Reverb but color wise far better than both. I need to run through a few more titles to see how the brightness holds up, but its a used unit so I am not sure how many hours are on this panel at this point. The distortion however is non existent in my view compared to the only other hmd in this FoV I have tried which is the original 5K from Pimax. However like all fresnel lenses it suffers from the godray effect something fierce.
But its greatest party trick the big viewing space is definitely a game changer. Even though it felt normal at first when I put it on, having gone back to my Quest 2 after I immediately felt the tunnelvision effect.
I think looking at it now had they actually went full scale around 2018 when the major announcement happened they would have been in a good spot with the HMD provided they leveraged economies of scale and put it in more direct competition with the likes of the original 5K which no offense to the Pimax crew this unit would have absolutely decimated in terms of lens clarity and color accuracy and overall weight the StarVR being 450g to the 5K’s 514.
I also think the dual USB-C connectors would have played nicely with a potential wireless module.
My plan is to use @NextGenVR 's Unity plugin to run through a set of Unity games and hopefully between Unreal Unlocker tool and the Unreal Engine plugin that exists from the StarVR team test some UE4 titles along the way.

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If you look over the other StatVR One reviews there is a cool unreal demo. We had it on the p4k on there it was called bullet time… A slow motion demo.

Apparently it was reworked and optimized for StarVR One.

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I know they have it on Oculus store still but I doubt that particular one has the necessary files to work correctly with the HMD, I will need to test and see. Most likely though I will need to sideload the StarVR dll along with it.

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@VR-TECH @Djonko and @john2910

Might know or be able to help with getting the optimized demo

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Well, their website still on. But It was certain that Acer was not going to put more into it. See, it was a joint venture, and when one partner collapse, Acer became the holder of the IP and assets. It is not a venture they will tackle without the original creators which are no longer involved

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One StarVR one was sold on Ebay 5 days ago for 3200, and it sold, call me surprised.

Yup, the creator of the StarVR visited one of my threads when first released the headset. I still use it and it ok.

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yep that was me, I plan on riding this thing into the ground. I am still not convinced by Pimax’s current crop of headsets we will see what happens with the 12K given they are going for QLED and I sincerely hope they improve the optics. The Varjo units that I would actually want to get have steam compatibility issues in a ton of titles and the Vrgineers units are absurdly heavy and pricey so also a no go for me.

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you bought it? Or you sold it. Im happy with my unit. Keeping mine

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I was the buyer. There is still nothing like it on the market at given how things are going at StarVR I am surprised they responded to my Dev tickets in Atlassian lol. However with that said the unit is nothing short of amazing. I plan on doing some VR work in Unreal so the extra fov is appreciated. Simultaneously I now get to have an IMAX theatre experience at home as well. Absolutely no plans to sell it until it breaks.

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Good, these units are unicorns. very rare

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I saw a comment on of @NextGenVR videos that someone had a StarVR unit which must have been an earlier dev kit because his did not have the new strap like mine and the dude was wondering if the DAS could be modded to work. And I vaguely recall somebody posted on reddit their VR adventure space which had the XT unit with a crossover stap like the ones that were being tested back in 2018 before they had the lighthouse tracking so I feel like these are still floating around out there, though I doubt too many prosumers even have an optitrack at home to make real use of that system. But idk if optitrack is even OpenVR compatible enought to work with steam games out of the box without some dev work or at the very least some major console commands maybe someone else knows more.

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This company looks interesting. Long before the 12k was announced @MarcoBalletta shared this link. Maybe a partner?

https://www.hypervision.ai/

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