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Aero Likely the First in a Series of Enthusiast Headsets from Varjo

January 21, 2022 From roadtovr

Varjo’s Aero headset is the first from the company that’s meant to appeal to individual customers rather than large organizations… and it probably won’t be the last.

Since the company’s inception, Varjo has sold high-end enterprise headsets to the likes of Fortune 500 companies. That is until just last month when the company started shipping its new Aero headset which was not only substantially cheaper but was, for the first time, sold without any kind of annual upkeep fee which made the company’s other headsets a non-starter for individual buyers.

Varjo Aero | Image courtesy Varjo

And while it’s possible the company had formulated Aero as a sort of one-off experiment, it seems Varjo has been satisfied enough with the reception that it intends for Aero to become an ongoing series of headsets for the high-end enthusiast segment.

Speaking to Road to VR this week, Varjo Chief Technical Officer Urho Konttori touched on Aero’s recent launch, saying that the headset is still backordered but he expects things to start catching up in February. As of now the company’s website advises “3–4 months” from purchase to delivery.

As for what happens in the future, Konttori said that Aero would “probably” become an ongoing series of headsets from the company, rather than a one-off. Although the company still seems primarily dead set on serving the high-end enterprise space, the move means the company also expects to target high-end enthusiasts with more headsets in the future.

That could dovetail in an interesting way with some of the software the company has been building internally, especially its XR cloud streaming tech; though initially targeted toward enterprise customers, the company confirmed that the tech supports any OpenVR/SteamVR applications without modification, and plans to expand the feature to other headsets in the future. While the company says that multi-headset support is primarily aimed at making XR more scalable within large organizations, it’s not so far fetched to think that the company could offer it to individuals at some point in the future.

Filed Under: News, varjo, Varjo Aero, VR Headset, vr industry

Varjo is Bringing Foveated XR Cloud Streaming to Its Headsets & Beyond

January 19, 2022 From roadtovr

Varjo, makers of high-end XR headsets, today announced it is introducing an XR cloud streaming service for enterprise customers. The streaming solution leverages the headset’s foveated rendering to deliver high quality XR experiences on less powerful machines. The company plans to eventually allow other headsets to make use of the service as well.

Varjo today revealed that it has been developing an XR cloud streaming service for its enterprise customers. The feature comes as an expansion to the recently introduced Varjo Reality Cloud, and the company says its goal is the make it easier for companies to scale the use of XR internally.

Varjo’s high-end headsets offer some of the highest resolution and sharpest visuals available in any headset on the market today. Rendering virtual content for those headsets understandably requires some pretty hefty hardware… a low-powered laptop simply won’t cut it. The need for computers with beefy GPUs to power the company’s headsets has constrained the ability of customers to scale the use of Varjo headsets more widely.

Varjo sees cloud rendering as a solution to this issue and has set out to build its own XR cloud streaming service. The idea is that the rendering is done on powerful servers in the cloud and then streamed to the headset. This approach can significantly reduce the power required of the local computer that the headset is plugged into.

Of course, Varjo is far from the first company to have experimented with this. And their situation is particularly challenging because of the high resolution of their headsets compared to many others on the market.

And yet the company seems to be rising to the challenge with what it says is its own solution built atop AWS’s low latency ‘Wavelength’ platform. I got an exclusive early preview of the feature running on the Varjo XR-3 headset.

When I first put the headset on I saw a high fidelity virtual car rendered against the real backdrop of the room as seen through the headset’s cameras—a demo I’ve seen in some form or another plenty of times in Varjo’s headsets. But this time the headset was plugged into a fairly thin laptop instead of a desktop-class rig. The car in front of me, explained Varjo’s Chief Technology Officer, Urho Konttori, was being rendered entirely in the cloud on an AWS server in Oregon… a few hundred miles North from where I was standing in Silicon Valley.

The scene in front of me appeared entirely sharp on the headset’s ‘retina resolution’ display, and aside from the occasional hiccup that showed a bit of artifacting around the edges of the car, it ran just as smoothly as I’d expect from a locally rendered XR experience.

Impressively, this wasn’t a highly controlled demo on some kind of dedicated, staged connection. According to Konttori, the laptop running the stream was plugged into the general internet connection that happened to be available at the space the company had reserved for its demo. The upstream and downstream connection was running over the regular old internet to the server in Oregon and back, which Konttori said demonstrates  the system is robust enough for real-world deployments.

That’s partly thanks to the company’s “foveated transport algorithm,” which it says makes use of the headset’s eye-tracking to help compress the downstream bandwidth requirement to just 35 megabits per second.

Konttori told me that Varjo is going the extra mile by focusing on the feature’s usability. Once a company has configured their software to run in the cloud, users can start a cloud session with a single click right from the Varjo software. Further, the company says it plans to support link-based invitations to cloud sessions, so that anyone with a headset and the Varjo software installed can instantly view the right content without installing any additional software.

Varjo’s XR-3 headset | Image courtesy Varjo

Varjo sees this ease-of-use as being particularly important for making it easier for customers to scale the use of XR headsets internally. While an auto manufacturer’s design team, for instance, might work with headsets regularly and have the high-powered machines to run them, other stakeholders are less likely to have an XR capable machine with all the requisite software ready to go. With cloud streamin, those stakeholders could more easily join design review sessions to sign off on the latest changes.

Konttori said that electric car maker Rivian is doing precisely this using an early version of Varjo’s cloud streaming feature integrated with the industry standard Autodesk VRED software.

“With Varjo Reality Cloud, we are able to make high-fidelity immersion a key part of our design development and scale it effectively across locations,” said Trevor Greene, Lead of Visualization Design at Rivian. “This is a turn-key solution that allows users with very different skill levels to be brought into an immersive environment to collaborate—something that hasn’t been possible before.”

But even if stakeholders could jump into an immersive design review with the click of a link… how many of them are likely to have a dedicated XR space—with a headset, tracking beacons, and all? To make XR truly scalable within organizations, you’d really want to support a wide range of headsets from Varjo’s ultra high-end all the way down to standalone devices.

Indeed, Varjo says it plans to do just this. Though the XR cloud streaming feature will only be available on its own headsets at launch, Konttori told me in the future the company plans to open the system up to other headsets, whether they’re PC or Android based. This could of course mean the possibility of using more affordable standalone headsets like Vive Focus 3 or Quest 2 as end-points for high-quality cloud rendered visuals, making it that much easier to scale XR more broadly inside of organizations.

– – — – –

Varjo’s XR cloud streaming feature is expected to be made widely available to enterprise customers in the first half of the year. It will be sold as an additional feature, on top of the existing annual fee for the company’s enterprise headsets, though the exact pricing model has yet to be revealed.

Filed Under: Cloud VR, News, varjo, varjo cloud streaming, Varjo Reality Cloud, varjo vr cloud, varjo vr cloud rendering, varjo xr cloud, varjo xr cloud rendering

Varjo Announces Aero, a High-end Headset Pared Down for Small(er) Businesses & Wealthy Enthusiasts

October 21, 2021 From roadtovr

Varjo, maker of high-end enterprise XR headsets, today announced Aero, a pared down version of the company’s latest headset that offers industry-leading fidelity and advanced features for a cheaper (but still hefty) price that makes the company’s offering more attractive to medium-sized businesses and wealthy VR enthusiasts.

For the last few years Varjo has been making some of the most advanced VR headsets on the planet, but with prices ranging from $3,200–$5,500 (plus an $800–$1,500 annual fee) it’s no wonder that Varjo counts Fortune 500 companies among its clients.

With the announcement of Varjo Aero, the company aims to launch a more affordable headset that’s more attractive for smaller businesses and the upper echelon of VR enthusiasts. It’s still far from cheap though; Varjo Aero is priced at $2,000 (with no annual fee), but this excludes SteamVR Tracking base stations and controllers.

Image courtesy Varjo

Varjo Aero is essentially the same as the company’s latest XR-3 headset, except without the ‘bionic display’ (which provides retina resolution at the center of the FOV), nor any of its advanced passthrough AR capabilities.

Even without the bionic display, Varjo Aero still offers a stunning 35 PPD with aspheric lenses that give it the best clarity and largest sweet-spot that you’ll find on any VR headset (except for, well, Varjo’s more expensive headsets).

Varjo says that orders for Aero begin today and the first shipments are expected by the end of 2021.

Check out the full specs below:

Varjo Aero Specs

Resolution 2,880 x 2,720 (7.8MP) per-eye, mini-LED LCD (2x)
Refresh Rate 90Hz
Lenses Aspheric
Field-of-view (claimed) 134° diagonal, 115° horizontal (at 12mm eye-relief)
Optical Adjustments IPD (automatic motor driven)
IPD Adjustment Range 57–73mm
Connectors USB-C → breakout box (USB-A 3.0, DisplayPort 1.4)
Cable Length 5m
Tracking SteamVR Tracking 1.0 or 2.0 (external beacons)
On-board cameras 2x eye-tracking
Input None included (supports SteamVR controllers)
Audio 3.5mm aux port
Microphone None (supports external mic through aux port)
Pass-through view No
Weight 487g + 230g headstrap with counterweight

Filed Under: aero, News, varjo, Varjo Aero, varjo steamvr, varjo vr headset, VR Headset

Varjo Has Begun Teasing a Special Event for a “Highly Anticipated Product”

October 8, 2021 From vrfocus

Varjo, the Finnish hardware manufacturer behind some very expensive (and highly regarded) virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) headsets, has begun teasing something new is in the pipeline. So far the only information available is via a brief mention of a launch event that takes place in a couple of weeks.

Varjo XR-3 and VR-3
Varjo XR-3 and VR-3

Over on its website, Varjo simply states: “This is the one you’ve been waiting for. Join us for a live event on Thursday October 21st, and witness the unveiling of our most highly anticipated product release yet.” There’s the option to signup and register for the launch event which begins at 12:00 pm ET/5:00 pm BST where Varjo co-founder & CTO Urho Konttori will reveal all.

Currently, Varjo has two products available for enterprise use cases. The VR-3 is priced at $3,990 USD (inc. a 1-year Varjo subscription) whilst the XR-3 comes in at a substantial $6990 (inc the subscription). So that gives you an idea of where Varjo has positioned itself in the market. Could this “highly anticipated product release” be a new headset and if it is where is it being positioned?

Varjo has built its business around very high-end hardware, with both headsets featuring the company’s “human-eye resolution” Bionic Display, a combination of two screens. A small central 70 PPD uOLED with a 1920 x 1920 px per eye resolution, with a secondary peripheral 30 PPD LCD, at 2880 x 2720 px per eye. They also feature eye-tracking, Ultraleap hand tracking, and more. So whatever the new product is, if it is hardware it won’t be cheap and cheerful.

Varjo Reality Cloud

The website does feature a singular image of someone wearing a headset but it does look exactly the same as Varjo’s other products. If it isn’t a headset then there’s always software. Although that’s more unlikely considering Varjo’s last major announcement in June was for Varjo Reality Cloud.

Whatever it is, the timing couldn’t be better. HTC Vive has its “Go with the Flow” event on 14th October whilst Facebook Connect is being held on 28th, making for an exciting few weeks for the XR industry. Could Varjo steal some of Facebook’s thunder? As further details come to light, VRFocus will keep you updated.

Filed Under: Enterprise, News, varjo, varjo vr-3, Varjo XR-3

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