StarVR comenzará su fabricación en serie en 2017

Starbreeze, the company that produces the John Wick Chronicles VR game using their proprietary StarVR system, was gloating that tickets to their experience had been sold out for the previous couple days. The John Wick experience operates out of two of the fourteen pods, with guests being cycled through the ten-minute experience at twenty-minute intervals (due to explanation, set-up, and equipment sanitization & cleaning). At $10 a ticket and eight hours of experience time per day, that means the company has made nearly $1,000 in two days with those two pods alone.

While most of the pods were equipped with HTC Vives, a pair of StarVR headsets were also at the IMAX location, powered by some of the beefiest graphics cards available hidden away in computers overhead.

StarVR is a headset from Starbreeze that features an ultra-panoramic view compared to the first headsets you can buy for your own home. It is still very much a developer kit, though, and only runs at 60 frames per second (FPS) compared to the Vive’s 90 FPS.

StarVR should probably come with an “experimental” sign so visitors to the center know it is not at the same level of polish as the Vive. I tried a rooftop assault version of the John Wick Chronicles VR game in the headset with a realistic gun accessory tracked using PhaseSpace.

I delighted in a moment when I spotted an attacker coming from my left, in my periphery, who would have been completely unnoticed if I had been wearing a Vive. balancer-model-imax-cord-managementBut the combo of software and hardware — which uses different optics and screens compared with the Rift and Vive — lacked a level of smoothness I’ve come to expect from room-scale VR.

The same cord management system is used for both the Vive and StarVR systems, relying on a pair of “balancers” to keep the cord out of the way but let it extend when taking a step.

IMAX was offering it with Starbreeze and Acer’s new high-end StarVR headset. Intended for theme parks and installations, the headset features a 210-degree field of view that fills your peripheral vision when compared to the 110-degree visuals of the Vive or Oculus Rift. (IMAX was also using a custom gun-prop controller for the game.) But while the expanded field of view was certainly a notable improvement, the StarVR otherwise offered a blurry image that had my stomach churning by the end.

IMAX chief business development officer Rob Lister acknowledges that the headset has some problems at the moment, calling it “very much a work in development still,” though the company sees potential in the wider field of view and increased resolution. “These are still prototypes, and it's going to be a while before that's productized, so that's going to take a bit of time.”