back to article Varjo promises Oculus-killing VR/AR, but is it the next Magic Leap?

A Finnish startup reckons it has stolen the march on Oculus and other mixed reality forms with a headset capable of both virtual and augmented reality and with a resolution that's on a par with the human eye. Dubbed Varjo Technologies, the Finnish startup has just 19 employees – including many ex-Nokia folks – and a smidgen of …

  1. AbelSoul
    Thumb Up

    Impressive

    That is a huge difference in perceived quality.

    Hopefully this sees production and helps lead to overall improvements in VR/AR.

  2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    In Photoshop anything is possible.

    It seems they are planning to apply the "Magnifying glass" tool seen on ARM computes of the 80's to VR.

    Yes, coping with spectable wearers is tough (and I'm not sure how well other AR/VR deal with them) but let's see how well the whole system works first.

    Sorry, but this is an area with lots of previous very dodgy claims about what can, will and is going to be done.

    1. Mikkon

      Re: In Photoshop anything is possible.

      Well I tested it my self. On my jop interview with them. I can tell you it is not photoshop.

      To bad that they did not offer me a job tho, it turns out they are only hiring Lead level developers :(

  3. Fading
    Alien

    Sounds interesting....

    Sort of TOBii eye tracking within the headset that will increase the resolution only at the dead ahead (pupil-wise). Picture in picture with a higher resolution on the smaller picture. Still going to need a high density of pixels over the entire view though - so some pretty powerful GPU will be required.

    Nice idea and uses the limitations of human eye-brain processing to improve the perceived quality

    - wonder if it powers-off the pixels at the blind spots :)

  4. DropBear

    I kinda expected the "pro only" market approach - everything they said indicated a possibly better but definitely much more expensive product than the competition, and VR already has a grave pricing issue. Meanwhile, dirt cheap VR viewers have a content problem (typically relying on an existing or built-in phone hardware they don't connect to a PC, so they are pretty much restricted to watching "360" movies - and they'll never get anywhere with that) while the rest of the goggles are PC-connected but stupidly expensive. Eventually, someone somewhere will figure out how to live stream Oculus-supporting PC games to a Cardboard viewer, and THEN VR will explode. Not before, though.

    1. jonathan keith
      1. DropBear
        Pint

        Re: It's a bit fiddly, but:

        @ jonathan keith: Gah, I'm apparently dyslexic at times - I only just noticed your link (luckily, I'm also stubborn). Thanks a bunch, this looks exactly like the missing link, I'll definitely look into it - I owe you a crate of these... -->

    2. ridley

      "pretty much restricted to watching "360" movies - and they'll never get anywhere with that"

      I've been led to believe that there is quite a market for 360° movies that can only be seen privately.

      1. DropBear

        "I've been led to believe that there is quite a market for 360° movies that can only be seen privately."

        That's entirely possible, but I have my doubts - the sole reason I'm interested in VR happens to be of the exact same nature, yet I've found the pre-recorded nature of the videos in question incredibly off-putting (even considering their key-points where you can switch to a different, uh, section). On the other hand, there is a veritable, literal gold rush of various entities getting paid on Patreon explicitly to work on "live", interactively generated CGI programs of the same nature - all of which run exclusively on PCs, some even supporting the "silver spoon" tier VR (Oculus and its ilk) I'll never be able to afford (or willing to use - fuck you, Zuck!). Hence my interest in a dirt-cheap headset that can show PC-generated content, and my pessimism at seeing it continually failing to materialize...

  5. yet_another_wumpus

    Right now, Occulus/Vive systems appear to be bringing even 1080ti GPUs to their knees, cranking up the resolution is only going to cause more problems. I'm guessing that "FOVE" trickery (cutting down processing outside the high resolution areas) is even more critical. If they can get the GPU to help out (probably some kind of double framebuffer: one imaged on a virtual sphere, and the second one computed line by line from that sphere (needing only trivial 3dFX level processing) onto the LCD/OLED device (preferably computing head movement line by line).

    GPU manufacturers talk a good game about VR, but they don't seem to be including anything really critical. I'd wouldn't be surprised if a "pro-VR" system has to ship first with a GPU+VR-post processor to deal with such issues. That could easily price it out of Occulus/VIve [Lenovo?] competition.

    On the other hand, not doing such will leave you with VGA/EGA/CGA of yesterday.

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