Chocolate bicycle.
Well not quite. It could be great. But a lot of the performance and cost requirements have a little to go before this becomes more useful and main stream.
HP Inc has released a backpack PC for the office. The company already makes the Omen backpack PC for gamers, but the newly-revealed HP Z VR Backpack PC is aimed at design pros. The PC weighs 4.65 kg, including the harness. Should you shoulder that burden you'll be lugging around an Intel Core i7-7820HQ with four cores and the …
Traditionally CAD wasn't mainstream, but in some sectors its very high price was still more than worth while for the savings it brought. The mainframes used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I don't have enough technical knowledge to judge if there is some way of not having to carry the PC around. Is there no wireless protocol (radio, visible light spectrum or whatever) that can allow a round trip of input from the users helmet to a workstation and back again with sufficiently low latency? We keep hearing of promising experiments with Li-Fi, and I would have assumed those high frequency market traders have funded the development of optical signal switching gear.
Surely what you need is augmented reality zombie attack game, to keep you warm on a cold winter's night, walking home from the pub.
With bonus marks if it can make your kebab look like the severed limb of one of the other survivors.
Or even better, make it look edible...
Per Anandtech it lasts an hour under heavy load, and there are two hot swappable batteries. I doubt that battery life is really an issue - how long will you want to run a simulation for training purposes?
I'd be more worried about how hot it would get sitting on your back, and how loud it is running under that load trying to use a 98.6* person as a heatsink.
More than half the surface area of the machine is exposed to air, which is comparable to a standard laptop.
The machine is lifted away from the user's back by the rucksack's padding. Personally I get on well with rucksacks with a suspended mesh against my back, but grooved padding is another tried and true approach to rucksack design. Curiously, stomping up a mountain carrying a dozen kilos can make you a bit warm too, so it's far from a new design consideration.
Oddly enough I remember suggesting the idea of a backpack PC for cable-free VR headsets right here in these forums. It looks like it's priced to see what the market will bare + recover the design cost from a niche market. But if it sells and VR goes mainstream, we might see an affordable consumer follow on, assuming full VR headsets still need cables.
PS. Wearing a VR headset, you can't see where you're going, so outdoor use isn't recommended.