Acer Inc. and Starbreeze AB announced today that their respective Board of Directors have approved the establishment of a joint venture for design, manufacturing, promotion, marketing and sales of the StarVR Virtual Reality (VR) Head-Mounted Display (HMD) as previously announced May 15th, 2016 upon signing the letter of intent.
The new company is provisionally named Acer Starbreeze Corporation, with an authorized capital of up to NT$800 million (US$25 million) shared equally between the companies, and is expected to be incorporated in Taiwan in the third quarter of this year subject to necessary approvals from regulators. Acer and Starbreeze will each be holding 50-percent of the total shares and incrementally inject capital to the joint venture based on capital needs and planned schedule.
“The joint venture with Starbreeze highlights Acer’s commitment of bringing premium user experiences in time to the market,” said Jason Chen, Corporate President and CEO, Acer Inc. “Combining Starbreeze’s industry-leading VR technology, and Acer’s established experience in hardware and computing, we will bring VR experiences to new heights with StarVR.”
“Our strategic alignment with Acer is going to exponentially improve the StarVR HMD in terms of quality, execution and market reach. Together, we will keep pushing the frontier of VR technology,” said Bo Andersson Klint, CEO, Starbreeze AB. “With the Acer production partnership for the StarVR headset, our joint venture with IMAX for location-based entertainment, and the content platform collaboration with Smilegate, we now have a perfect ecosystem for our VR centers.”
With its best-in-class cinematic experience, StarVR targets professional- and location-based entertainment market such as high-end cinemas, gaming arcades, automotive retail and aviation training. We expect to ship a small volume of units in 2016, while mass production is scheduled for 2017.
StarVR provides a truly immersive VR experience with its unique ultra-wide 210-degree horizontal field of view, with custom optics that deliver great image quality across the eye’s natural vision. This allows users to move their eyes freely in any direction and continue to be immersed in the virtual world, without the sensation of wearing blinders that conventional VR displays bring. Powered by a dual Quad HD display architecture, one per eye, StarVR provides a realistic visual experience with a total panoramic definition of 5120×1440 pixels, with highly-detailed scenes and virtually no screen door effect.
