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I have to admit I got some sticker shock when I saw the price. I really wanted to get this too... Looking at the details of the article I still can't see what

I have to admit I got some sticker shock when I saw the price. I really wanted to get this too... Looking at the details of the article I still can't see what the breakout feature is that keeps me from just getting an Oculus Quest and using the Immersed app to do basically the same thing. The biggest "negative" the article seems to be focusing on is that you need a Facebook account to use Oculus Quest but I don't see many limits on the basic experience. Also, it focuses on how no sacrifices were made and that this is a premium product. This is a hard sell since you can't wear it or try it first before forking over almost 3 grand. When iPhones first were released, they were a premium product, but you could go to an Apple Store and play with it first. Here you have to rely on a datasheet and trust that these improvements will significantly matter. I would much rather have started with a less premium product that allows me to try it first and if I fall in love with the potential for productivity, I may invest it the premium product in the future.

ugjka 5y ago
Would make sense for them to have an easy and painless return and refund policy
- kanetw 5y ago
  I'll talk with George about introducing a refund policy. In fact I'm pretty sure we had it in the original drafts for the webshop, but since we moved to Kickstarter funding we haven't thought about that yet.
stocknoob 5y ago
I think 3 grand for an early adopter product is cheap. The Macintosh was $2500 in 80s dollars (5-6k today) when it launched. If this is something that actually helps your work, a few hundred a month is well worth it.
- georgewsinger 5y ago
  We should have added comps for early/retro PCs =] My dad (who isn't a technical person; lawyer by trade) once told me that he spent $5K in early 90's dollars (which is much higher today) on an early 386 color laptop. This was like the price of a new car. (Not saying Simula's VRC is an apples to apples comparison with this, or that we'd ever want to charge that much for something, but it is interesting to hear about how expensive some early computing devices were when the laptop industry was getting off the ground).
kanetw 5y ago
> Looking at the details of the article I still can't see what the breakout feature is that keeps me from just getting an Oculus Quest and using the Immersed app to do basically the same thing. The biggest "negative" the article seems to be focusing on is that you need a Facebook account to use Oculus Quest but I don't see many limits on the basic experience. Compared to a Quest/Immersed combo: * we offer significantly higher PPD (and better optics with no ghost images, Fresnel rings, etc.; but that's hard to quantify) than any other headset on the market except super-high end ones. You would not be able to read text on a Quest like you can on a normal 27" monitor; you can with our headset. * Immersed does not do window management. We support unlimited, actual windows. Immersed only does a handful (up to 10 at reduced resolution? need to check) virtual displays, which is pretty annoying from a UX perspective. * Immersed needs to be tethered, which is reduced quality and higher latency due to the WiFi connection.
- lhl 5y ago
  Is there more detail/discussion on the optics posted anywhere? It would be nice to see some info like PPD across the image area, distortion (corrected and uncorrected) and chromatic aberration, pupil swim/eye box, focal distance, and some other display details like contrast, black levels, brightness - I've been interested (and spent a fair bit of time working on a POC several years ago) in VR workspaces, but shelved my work due to the lack of HMDs with sufficient visual quality/comfort. Lately I've been interested in the newest upcoming micro-oled/pancake lens wave of devices (Arpara, MeganeX, etc) which seem to hit decent PPDs at reasonable price points. $3K doesn't seem entirely unreasonable but it makes me wonder - the XR2 has 3K/eye support and does all the hard work for device design, 6dof, and you could probably work with an ODM like Goertek to get an almost finished product at a fraction of the price? Also for hand tracking, are you planning to integrate something COTS like an Ultraleap 170?
  - kanetw 5y ago
    We could make a blog post about it. I feel like a lot of it is going to be super technical for most people, though. Here's what I can answer off the top of my head. Centroid separation for lateral color is roughly 0mm for 0-30 degrees then sharply decreases at about -0.1mm/5 degrees When eye is rotated 25 degrees horizontally, pupil swim is within 10-20 arcmin for (+-40 V, 0-40 H) field angles. This is already fairly low, but we also plan to correct it with eye tracking if it's noticeable. Allowable eye shift is +-2mm, eye box accounting for eye rotation is around 18mm. Full 20um RMS spot size in that region for the foveal region (+-25 deg). Display is a LCD panel. 600:1 contrast, 150 nits brightness, 83% NTSC. We actually considered pancake lenses, but the low transmission (15% in a pancake design vs ~85% in ours) and the ghost image issues made us step away from them. XR2 does all the hard work, but Qualcomm pretty much ignored us when we messaged them. Besides, it'd pretty much be dead weight since we want an x86 processor for our primary use case as a laptop replacement. And yeah we're planning to integrate the Ultraleap module if they get their Linux software sorted. If not, there's fallbacks. (I think we also messaged Goertek and got nothing, so... a big part of why we're doing this, and will likely open source most of it, is that all the usual vendors didn't talk to us)

ugjka 5y ago

Would make sense for them to have an easy and painless return and refund policy

kanetw 5y ago
I'll talk with George about introducing a refund policy. In fact I'm pretty sure we had it in the original drafts for the webshop, but since we moved to Kickstarter funding we haven't thought about that yet.

stocknoob 5y ago

I think 3 grand for an early adopter product is cheap. The Macintosh was $2500 in 80s dollars (5-6k today) when it launched. If this is something that actually helps your work, a few hundred a month is well worth it.

georgewsinger 5y ago
We should have added comps for early/retro PCs =] My dad (who isn't a technical person; lawyer by trade) once told me that he spent $5K in early 90's dollars (which is much higher today) on an early 386 color laptop. This was like the price of a new car. (Not saying Simula's VRC is an apples to apples comparison with this, or that we'd ever want to charge that much for something, but it is interesting to hear about how expensive some early computing devices were when the laptop industry was getting off the ground).

kanetw 5y ago

> Looking at the details of the article I still can't see what the breakout feature is that keeps me from just getting an Oculus Quest and using the Immersed app to do basically the same thing. The biggest "negative" the article seems to be focusing on is that you need a Facebook account to use Oculus Quest but I don't see many limits on the basic experience. Compared to a Quest/Immersed combo: * we offer significantly higher PPD (and better optics with no ghost images, Fresnel rings, etc.; but that's hard to quantify) than any other headset on the market except super-high end ones. You would not be able to read text on a Quest like you can on a normal 27" monitor; you can with our headset. * Immersed does not do window management. We support unlimited, actual windows. Immersed only does a handful (up to 10 at reduced resolution? need to check) virtual displays, which is pretty annoying from a UX perspective. * Immersed needs to be tethered, which is reduced quality and higher latency due to the WiFi connection.

lhl 5y ago
Is there more detail/discussion on the optics posted anywhere? It would be nice to see some info like PPD across the image area, distortion (corrected and uncorrected) and chromatic aberration, pupil swim/eye box, focal distance, and some other display details like contrast, black levels, brightness - I've been interested (and spent a fair bit of time working on a POC several years ago) in VR workspaces, but shelved my work due to the lack of HMDs with sufficient visual quality/comfort. Lately I've been interested in the newest upcoming micro-oled/pancake lens wave of devices (Arpara, MeganeX, etc) which seem to hit decent PPDs at reasonable price points. $3K doesn't seem entirely unreasonable but it makes me wonder - the XR2 has 3K/eye support and does all the hard work for device design, 6dof, and you could probably work with an ODM like Goertek to get an almost finished product at a fraction of the price? Also for hand tracking, are you planning to integrate something COTS like an Ultraleap 170?
- kanetw 5y ago
  We could make a blog post about it. I feel like a lot of it is going to be super technical for most people, though. Here's what I can answer off the top of my head. Centroid separation for lateral color is roughly 0mm for 0-30 degrees then sharply decreases at about -0.1mm/5 degrees When eye is rotated 25 degrees horizontally, pupil swim is within 10-20 arcmin for (+-40 V, 0-40 H) field angles. This is already fairly low, but we also plan to correct it with eye tracking if it's noticeable. Allowable eye shift is +-2mm, eye box accounting for eye rotation is around 18mm. Full 20um RMS spot size in that region for the foveal region (+-25 deg). Display is a LCD panel. 600:1 contrast, 150 nits brightness, 83% NTSC. We actually considered pancake lenses, but the low transmission (15% in a pancake design vs ~85% in ours) and the ghost image issues made us step away from them. XR2 does all the hard work, but Qualcomm pretty much ignored us when we messaged them. Besides, it'd pretty much be dead weight since we want an x86 processor for our primary use case as a laptop replacement. And yeah we're planning to integrate the Ultraleap module if they get their Linux software sorted. If not, there's fallbacks. (I think we also messaged Goertek and got nothing, so... a big part of why we're doing this, and will likely open source most of it, is that all the usual vendors didn't talk to us)