Varjo was in a hotel suite near the show and was showing the latest version of the headset that we first saw at MWC (We Get a Chance to Look at Varjo’s Headset) and which combines a high resolution centre area of the display with a lower resolution wide field of view display. We thought that the product looked even better than when we saw it in Barcelona – the few months of development have helped – although it was still obvious that the centre of the display was different. Staff told us that this was because they hadn’t yet colour matched the two displays, but that they thought this would be easy. (The sceptical part of me wonders, if it was easy, why they hadn’t already done it?)
Varjo told us that is working on gaze recognition to help to optimise the delivery of the high resolution content to the headset and plans to implement it ‘later’.
The company also showed a headset in a Mixed Reality mode based on dual 12 megapixel cameras that create the images in the headset with very low latency – in fact the company said that the images get to the compositor with ‘sub one frame latency’. The cameras capture at 90Hz to match the display and have the same field of view. The good field of view of the demo helped to make it more convincing than most demos that you were looking through goggles at the real world.
The effect was very impressive and in the suite, the company had a demonstration of a 3D rendered motorcycle with very high quality. We couldn’t get a good image but we found this very good video which was able to capture the effect well. (note that the motorbike was not in the room!)
The headset had a big bunch of cables and was clearly a prototype, but the company hopes to get the basic headset to market by the end of the year, with a mixed reality add-on available in 2019.
