I am fortunate to be among the first to test the new VR-1 headset from Varjo. This headset is for the professional industial design market used by worldknown companies like Volvo, Audi , Airbus, Siemens and Saab Defence and Sequirity. Among the founders you find heavy industrial founders coming from Nokia and Microsoft like Niko Eiden(research led to Hololens) Urho Konttori , Roope Rainistro and Klaus Melakari. One of the big investors in the company is Niklas Zennström founder of Skype.
Varjo uses a socalled Bionic Display and a"20/20 Eye Tracker". It works by combinding two displays, one with a high 60 pixel density (20 times denser than any consumer VR headset) in the central 20 degrees of view and one with fewer pixels in the pherphery. This together creates a near human eye resolution and works just like your eye focus.
So how was it? To be honest, -I haven´t tested too many VR headsets but I can tell you this was a great experience with crisp imaging allmost like stepping into reality as I stumbled into an Unreal model of an appartment. It was allmost like I could grasp things and feel the texture of materials in the model. I could see the smallest details, -read a crisp display on an oven in the kitchen and see fabric textures and the threads on the carpet. The lightning in the model was just like in reality and I could step closer to the window to see the environment two floores up outside. The headset was lightweight (605g) and it was easy to move around with the 10m lightweight cable. I allmost walked into a table forgetting where I was on the way into the virtual bathroom right behind me. Varjo has definitively set a new standard for Virtual Reality and first tested it will be really hard not to be disappointed going back to a consumer headset now I know how real VR should be. Unfortunately I did not have the time to test it out with Enscape this time but based on the experience with the Unreal model, Enscape and Varjo will definetely be a gamechanger in architectural visualisation. I cannot wait to test the new Varjo XR-1 augmented reality model coming in Desember.
