New VR Headsets Galore
There are a whole host of new VR headsets coming out soon that put the VR community at large in a state of rapture.
Play Station’s 2nd Virtual Reality headset comes out in 2023
Play Station recently announced the expected cost of its long awaited 2nd Virtual Reality headset at £530 / $550 / €600 (available early 2023), which promises to be much much better that the first version that they rushed out way back in 2016.
Oculus, I mean Meta, has finally released their much anticipated Meta Quest Pro. This seems to be focused on Augmented Reality (AR) as its pass-through cameras, which were limited to black and white in the Quest 1 and 2 headsets, will now be full colour. This means that computer-generated graphics can be “painted over” the full colour stream of what’s really out there enabling the dubious dreams of AR to be realised. We had a chance to test it out last week and it certainly was an improvement on the Quest 2. The Quest Pro is lightweight, has much better screen resolution and a prettier palette of colours, but for £1,500 we’ll be sticking with the Quest 2 for the foreseeable future thank you very much.
We at Brain Man VR are of the strong opinion that while VR is likely to help the world in a variety of different ways, AR is a different matter. Just imagine how many ways it will negatively affect society when everybody who currently spends all day staring at their smartphone screen instead is permanently absorbed by the screens beamed onto the inner surface of their AR glasses?
Don’t buy these, they’ll ruin society.
Combined with AI apps that will automatically analyse everything the camera gets sight of, it is almost inevitably just a matter of time before anyone wearing these glasses can glance in your direction as you walk down the street, only for their augmented view to contain all sorts of uncomfortably revealing “private” information about you pulled out of the ether. While we accept that AR glasses are likely to supplant VR headsets eventually, we are not looking forward to this day. We urge everyone to stubbornly stick to a good old fashioned VR headset for as long as possible, to keep the lines between virtual and reality clearly defined for as long as possible.
Anyway back to VR. Sadly It’s Bradley recently leaked some CAD designs of a further Meta headset that is tentatively being dubbed the Quest 3. And Pico is also soon to release the Pico 4, which it “accidentally” posted too early on social media, yet another new headset that is also getting VR enthusiasts all frothy with excitement.
We actually had the chance to have a go on the Pico 3 and Pico 4 at the recent Augmented World Expo conference in Lisbon (aka AWE EU) and the latter is very impressive. It offers the kind of high definition resolution we’d only previously seen with a Vive Pro headset running on a decent graphics PC. Not bad for a lightweight stand-alone VR headset! Not dissimilar to the Quest Pro experience but at £375 the Pico 4 offers a much better price point and even cuts a much more impressive aesthetic in terms of the headset design than the Quest 2 can offer at £400 with its inferior resolution.
