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Starbreeze partners with Acer for StarVR headset manufacture

by Mark Tyson on 16 May 2016, 12:31

Tags: Acer (TPE:2353)

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Starbreeze and Acer will work together to design, manufacture, promote and sell the StarVR head mounted display (HMD). The StarVR HMD is a device first seen at E3 last year. This device is aiming at the high-end and thus Starbreeze and Acer are looking at targeting the professional- and location-based entertainment markets as potential customers.

While everyone has heard of Acer, Starbreeze may be unfamiliar. Stockholm headquartered Starbreeze is best known as a games software publisher. The biggest title in its back catalogue is probably Payday 2 but you might have seen it in the news as the developer of upcoming VR games based upon the John Wick films and the Walking Dead TV series.

It seems that Starbreeze is unsatisfied with the quality of VR HMDs already out there so wants to produce something higher-end for those with the cash and for pro/business customers. To start with it envisions its VR equipment being used in 'StarCades' around the US – video games arcades with its powerful hardware installed. Acer must think that it is onto something good.

Acer President and CEO Jason Chen said that his firm is devoting R&D resources in VR ecosystems to create "a coherent and high-quality experience". Furthermore, "Starbreeze and Acer share the same goal of delivering best-in-class VR applications, and we look forward to unlocking new VR possibilities together with this partnership."

If you look at the dedicated StarVR headset website you will see its superior tech specs. Notable are the HMD's expansive 210 degrees horizontal and 130 degrees vertical FOV delivered by the dual 5.5-inch Dual HD display configuration. It also promises a low latency experience.

It will be interesting to see the price of this HMD when it emerges. Perhaps the second generation Oculus and Vive HMDs will deliver dual-display VR headsets to rival StarVR.



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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“wants to produce something higher-end for those with the cash”

Because Oculus and Vive are just too budget oriented? :/
No, but they don't deliver high definition experience at present, imho. Honestly the GPU tech needs to improve to power the necessary resolution for me to buy in. This thing is going to need something like a GTX1070 SLI set-up as a bear minimum with those kinds of specs.

Basically this is for people with money to burn.
To be fair, Oculus and Vive aren't the only two players in town. Every other offerings are aiming at lower end/cheaper market than the Oculus/Vive. Those guys are trying to out-spec the big two, so it would make sense that they would try to position above them (with a price to match). It will be interesting to see what the market will tolerate. Would people pay 4 digits for a VR headset? Or will the sub Ā£300 range win out? Can all of them co-exist, or will we end up with a duopoly in the end.

That said, Oculus has been associated with VR long, long before any other players so they are pretty much the benchmark every other VR headset will be compared to. It will be interesting to see if StarVR can come late into the party and convince enough of the market to pay more so that they can build a niche.

As to the headset itself, I'd wait for reviewer to comment if dual screen is really a superior implementation, and whether there is also a cost in the bulk of the headset to be paid.
In 3 or 4 generations time we'll look back on today's headsets and laugh at how low res and bulky they were. I'm waiting till it's something you effectively put on like glasses and (preferably) wire free, using a slim minimal cable if absolutely necessary.
so the minimum requirements for the StarVR is an AMD Vega card with HBM2.0, ZEN 6 core 12 threads and 16gigs of 2333mhz DDR4?