Three of the most talked-about virtual reality headsets—the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR—are less than a year old, but if you stopped by the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week you'd be forgiven for concluding that they were as obsolete as an Apple eMac.
That's because much of the buzz at this year's GDC, an annual hobnob of bigwigs from the gaming and consumer tech industries, was about augmented reality glasses and standalone VR headsets—the kind that require neither a PC nor a smartphone to run.
Problem is, the technology to make these devices practical isn't quite ready yet, despite early attempts from companies such as Microsoft (the augmented reality HoloLens) and Oculus (the Santa Cruz standalone prototype). But at GDC this year, Microsoft, LG, Valve, Acer, and many others offered a glimpse of what what consumers can expect when the devices eventually go on sale.
Valve and LG have teamed up to create an extremely limited-edition VR developer headset that runs the Steam VR game development platform. It doesn't have a catchy name and LG is only giving it to a hand-picked selection of developers attending GDC this year, but it will form the template for a consumer headset that the Korean tech giant plans to unveil later this year.
LG and Valve offered PCMag a brief demo of the headset, which, like the Vive, requires a high-end PC with a discrete graphics card to run. But unlike the Vive, LG's prototype includes a flip-up visor that allows developers to rapidly switch between the real and virtual worlds if, say, they need to adjust some code on their PCs.
Inside, there's a 3.4-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2,880-by-1,280, which translates into 1,440-by-1,280 for each eye. It has a 110-degree field of view and a 90Hz refresh rate, which is low enough not to overly tax the GPU, but high enough not to cause motion sickness. On the outside, LG uses Valve's room-scale tracking sensors and controller design, which should be very familiar to Vive owners.
Since the LG unit is tethered, the big question is whether or not the consumer version it eventually morphs into will offer a material advantage over the Vive, Rift, or PlayStation VR. The demos I experienced showed no discernible difference in the quality of the VR experience, so the likely differentiator will be price—Oculus just lowered the price of the Rift to $499, and LG could be planning to go even lower.
On the other end of the spectrum is an augmented reality developers kit from Microsoft and Acer. The duo will begin shipping the kit to select partners this month, and on the surface it appears similar to the LG prototype. It has a flip-up visor and similar specs: 1,440-by-1,280 resolution for each eye, a 90Hz refresh rate, and is designed as a testbed for game developers to kick around their ideas.
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But that's where the similarities end. Acer's unit is a very different headset from the LG prototype. It requires no physical sensors placed outside of the device, and the experience is a variation of the HoloLens—opaque glasses that superimpose the virtual world on top of your living room or wherever you happen to be standing while you're wearing it.
The Acer is also much closer to consumer availability. Microsoft promised that every Windows 10 PC will support mixed reality by the end of 2017, and Acer, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Asus plan to begin selling VR headsets for as low as $299 soon thereafter. Xbox One will likely get mixed reality support sometime in 2018.
So where does that leave untethered headsets? It's the subject of great speculation, even among the engineers who are working on the guts that will power them. One thing is clear: the Rift, Vive, and PlayStation VR are but a brief overture in what the gaming and tech industries hope will be a virtual reality symphony of Mahler-esque proportion.