StarVR announced at SIGGRAPH 2018 its next Virtual Reality goggles, the StarVR One, which are expected to make a notable leap in terms of visual quality over the main competitors. The company has not been able to reveal the full specifications of the product, but enough information to know that we are facing a serious rival for the race to offer the best VR glasses.
StarVR indicates that its glasses will use proprietary AMOLED panels with an RGB color model for “Virtual Reality optimized” pixels along with the use of Fresnel lenses designed by them. Each AMOLED panel is 4.77 inches with an eye resolution of 1464 pixels x 1830 pixels, giving a total resolution of 2928 x 1830 pixels @ 90 Hz. As far as the field of vision of the glasses is concerned, it promises 210° horizontally and 130° vertically, thus offering a “natural peripheral vision for truly immersive experiences in virtual reality”, i.e. they are close to the real field of vision of the human being.
Last but not least, the company has managed to give Tobii a real utility, that is, the eye tracking technology, which is incorporated into the glasses and will have a crucial mission: to automatically measure the user’s IPD (interpupillary distance) and make any distortion adjustments. In addition, it will allow you to render only what you see to save resources.
In terms of minimum requirements, StarVR One will require an Intel Core i7-7700K or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with 16 GB of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. In the face of any information about its availability or price, not a word.
The StarVR One HMD promises SteamVR 2.0 Tracking with visuals running at 90 frames per second, eye-tracking and a field of view covering “nearly 100 percent of natural human vision.”
StarVR One uses custom fresnel lenses in front of a pair of AMOLED panels. Each panel carries dimensions of 1830×1464 pixels (I triple checked that figure), making for a total of around 5.4 million pixels on the display. That’s a step up from Vive Pro and its 4.6 million pixels. StarVR features a wider field of view, though, claimed at 210-degrees horizontal and 130-degrees vertical. Representatives said it has more than 16 pixels per degree and that counting subpixels on StarVR (red-green-blue for every pixel) would make for a better comparison to a display like the Vive Pro’s.
The specs indicate more pixels vertically (than the 8K), but fewer pixels horizontally, with a slightly larger FOV (horizontally). It appears that the pixels will be even more visible than on a Pimax 5K.
Not at all, because this is using an RGB Stripe matrix, which means that every pixel is being displayed with 3 subpixels as opposed to 2 subpixels. So most probably you won’t see any SDE here at all. Then on top of it this is an AMOLED display, so this is going to look incredibly good.
Agreed. The color and contrast should be great, but the pixels will be fairly large, so I think you’ll be able to see them. That’s separate from SDE, which is due to coverage issues (large pixel boarders). The StarVR may or may not have any noticeable SDE. (I haven’t heard any mention of it, good or bad.)
The headset looks like it could be really good. Too bad it’s for commercial use only though. I’d be interested to see how StarVr performs compared to the Pimax 8k anyway though.
Really looking forward to a decent review. It this thing is any good I’m going to buy it as long as the price isn’t TOO crazy (this thing really shouldnt cost more than 5k usd IMHO)
As I thought- meh. The eye tracking is a non story. Resolution is a downgrade from Pimax. The screen type is very nice- but it’s too expensive to buy IF you could buy it. Which you can’t.
Certainly not worth the huge price multiple over Pimax.
I will assume the “One” is their prosumer device with support for Steam Tracking 2.0 and at 450 grams with 90Hz and 210 Fov on an OLED display is quite a decent offering…pending its price of course. While I hope is not too daft with the likes of The Pimax 8K and the 8K-X in the pipeline.
And it comes with eye tracking for automated IPD and supports foveated rendering using their SDK too which are nice-to-haves.
I noticed they have a Type-C and a 2 x DP adapter so this is likely to support dual cards too with VRWorks.
Don’t get too caught up with resolution as a determining factor when it comes to optimum visuals. This could have less SDE than the Pimax due to the pixel layout for instance. Better contrast, brighter, faster etc.
Of course, as you say they will slap a premium price on it too until somebody else competes at this level.
Not necessarily. Rumor has it that the Pimax 8k lenses only use 50% of the panel. If (and IF) the StarVR would use near 100% then the resulting PPD would be quite similar.
I have a question, that may or may not be considered a stupid question…
We now know this headset will be made for commercial enterprises and not for consumers. We all get that. I’m pretty sure that those of us who still want one will find a way to purchase one even if we have to present ourselves as a commercial business. However, my question is what are the chances of this HMD being able to run current VR supported games properly? How exactly does this work? Will the headset need to have SteamVR support? And even if it does, how will current VR games look on an HMD not designed for current consumer grade PC games, and has double the FOV of the Rift/Vive/Oddessey/etc? Will there be for example, huge black borders on both sides of the headset in these games because of the massive increase in FOV?
One thing is for sure, I certainly have NO interest in buying this thing if it won’t run the games I’m currently enjoying like Project Cars 2, Iracing, Assetto Corsa, etc.
