Somnium VR1, the European wide field of view PC VR headset, has just received a price increase for all three remaining variants, bringing the entry price to €3000.
It comes two weeks after the company announced it had started shipping to the US, and simplified its lineup down from seven consumer variants to three.
Who Is Somnium And What Is VR1?
Somnium is a Czech startup previously solely focused on its social VR platform Somnium Space. But in late 2021 it announced the Somnium VR1 headset with a monster spec sheet for the time, in partnership with VRgineers – known for its ultra-high end XTAL headsets for enterprise. Originally Somnium VR1 was pitched as a hybrid headset with standalone capabilities via an onboard Snapdragon XR2 chipset, but that idea was ditched in 2022 to focus on making it a solely PC VR headset instead.
VR1 uses the same 2880×2880 QD-LCD w/ Mini-LED panels used in Pimax Crystal. The displays have 20000:1 contrast via local dimming, 100% NTSC color gamut, and support 72Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz refresh rate, with an “experimental” 144Hz mode available too. The output brightness to your eyes is 210 nits, around double that of Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro.
Those displays are paired with large dual-element aspheric lenses Somnium claims deliver a field of view of around 130° horizontal and 105° vertical. That’s wider than any other VR headset on the market. Pimax “5K” and “8K” were even wider, but are no longer in production and had significant distortion in the periphery.
This focus on expanding field of view is why Somnium VR1 is so bulky in an era of far slimmer pancake lens headsets.
Somnium says the price increases are due to production being “far more complex than initially anticipated”. Specifically, the company is experiencing quality yield issues with its displays and lenses, requiring complex QA and rejecting some component stock.
As for new VR1 orders placed today, Somnium says those will take one to two months to ship, and that it is “trying to accelerate production as fast as we can to meet the demand”. Later this year, it plans to start selling spare parts for Somnium VR1 to enable self-repairs.
David Heaney
We went hands-on with Somnium VR1 back in July. You should read our full impressions for the full nuance, but here’s how we concluded that report:
Given the pricing, this clearly isn’t the next mainstream VR headset or even the next Valve Index. But it could be the ideal headset for relatively wealthy flight simulator and racing simulator enthusiasts who are already used to spending thousands to get the ideal setup. A native DisplayPort image delivered to a truly wide field of view with nearly 3K resolution and eye tracking isn’t something you can currently get from any other company, at any price.
However, the experience of VR1’s lenses seems to vary considerably from person to person, far more than with most other headsets, and it’s unclear to what degree dialing in the configuration can solve issues you might experience. That makes VR1 a very difficult headset to recommend. Somnium plans to organize community meetups throughout both Europe and the US to let prospective buyers try the headset on, so if you’re on the fence I’d advise attending one of these meetups to see how well VR1 is suited to your own eyes, not mine.
