Sharp is crowdfunding a strange lightweight tethered PC VR headset that can also connect to one of its smartphones.
Called Xrostella VR1, the headset features dual 2160×2160 LCD panels paired with “light-efficient” pancake lenses with a 90-degree field of view, two grayscale fisheye tracking cameras, and one color passthrough camera. The included controllers, meanwhile, seem to resemble Quest 2’s but with more hefty tracking rings.
Sharp says the headset’s “body” weighs just 198 grams, making it lighter than any shipping headsets except Bigscreen Beyond 2 and Shiftall MeganeX.
IPD adjustment between 58mm and 71mm is supported, as well as diopter adjustment from 0D to -9.0D.
While Xrostella VR1 is primarily designed for PC VR, Sharp says it will also be compatible with its AQUOS sense10 smartphone, projecting the phone’s display onto a fixed virtual screen. More smartphone models will be “expanded sequentially”, the company claims.
David Heaney
It’s unclear exactly who Xrostella VR1 is supposed to be for.
We haven’t seen a major VR headset use only two tracking cameras since the Windows MR headsets that came before HP Reverb G2, as this approach severely limits the tracking range of the controllers. It’s also rare for a headset to only use one camera for passthrough, as this results in a complete lack of correct depth and scale.
Further, the lack of eye tracking and hand tracking means the headset probably won’t appeal to many VRChat users, while the narrow field of view and mediocre resolution won’t appeal to simulator fans.
Of course, it’s somewhat premature to assess the product proposition here without a price. If available at a low cost, Sharp could be aiming to offer a kind of “ultralight headset for the rest of us”. But that seems unlikely.
Sharp says it will crowdfund Xrostella VR1 on the Japanese platform GREENFUNDING later this month. It’s unclear why a company of Sharp’s size is crowdfunding rather than just launching, but it may be a mechanism to gauge interest before taking the risk.
