StarVR

The Oculus and Vive were hardly  out in their final consumer forms before HMDs like the StarVR appeared on the horizon promising a generational leap over and above what we currently think of as state of the art.

While issues of persistence and latency have been the main problems HMDs like the Oculus and Vive have worked to solve, they have not really done as much when it comes to the other major factor in immersion: field of view.

It seems almost to be out of the blue, but the same company that brought us the Riddick video games and Payday 2, Starbreeze Studios, is now poised to release a very high-end HMD known as the StarVR.

The StarVR’s main claim to fame is its immense 210-degree horizontal field of view. Even more incredible, the vertical field of view is a 130 degrees. This means that the vertical FoV of this HMD meets or exceeds the horizontal FoV of most other top-tier products.

Not only this, but Starbreeze claim that they have 100% binocular overlap, which means that all bases are covered when trying to stimulate true depth perception. The fact that the StarVR claims both 100% binocular overlap AND the widest field of view on the market is a true milestone for VR – if they can deliver.

The specially-designed lenses are designed in such a way that sharp image quality is possible across its entire surface, so not just the foveal part of vision, but also the extreme periphery.

The StarVR is still a prototype and talks with Acer as a manufacturing partner only began in 2016. The extremely high specifications of the StarVR is likely to make it very expensive at first. It seems likely that these units will be sold to entertainment businesses at first. To this end, Starbreeze has already entered talks with iMAX for location-based VR theaters.