In an interview with Road To VR, Starbreeze chief technology officer Emmanuel Marquez has commented on the commercial future of the StarVR head-mounted display. Marquez said that Starbreeze has no plans to bring a consumer version of the StarVR to market.
Rather, the company is focusing on event spaces, as evidenced by its recent partnership with IMAX that will see the headset appear in “multiplexes, malls and other commercial destinations”. Commenting further on the position, Marquez added:
“…For the moment we play pretty firmly in the location-based and enterprise market.”
The StarVR headset is unique in that it boasts a 210 degree wide field of view – which is around double that of existing VR headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Starbreeze believes this wide field of view is what sets the StarVR headset apart, though it could also potentially mean that content would need to be specifically crafted for the hardware.
In other developments for the headset, Marquez also mentioned that the Starbreeze is working on its own room-scale tracking solution for the StarVR, as well as its own motion controller akin to the Oculus Touch and HTC Vive controllers. Finally, Starbreeze plans to eventually integrate eye-tracking into the headset, so support foveated rendering – the ability to increase the detail where the user is looking in the frame, and decrease it at the periphery of the gaze, in order to boost performance.
The first IMAX / StarVR pilot location will open sometime this year in Los Angeles. Starbreeze plans to expand to another five IMAX locations by the end of the year.
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