For years, Varjo has made virtual reality headsets for enterprise and military customers, with over 25 percent of Fortune 100 companies using it in various forms for their operations. Are they more advanced than your typical consumer headset? That’s what the outfit is claiming, which, we guess, is supported by their extensive use in professional settings. Their latest headset, the Varjo XR-4, further builds on their advanced extended reality tech.
According to the outfit, their newest headset offers the highest fidelity for both VR and mixed-reality experiences in professional applications, producing mixed visuals that they claim to be indistinguishable from the real world. Key to this is the outfit’s passthrough camera technology, which allows the optical sensors to behave like human eyes, allowing it to recreate the real world virtually in a manner that mirrors the way we see the world.
The Varjo XR-4 is equipped with dual 4K mini-LED displays (one for each eye) that boast a density of 51 pixels per degree, just below the human eye’s threshold of 60 pixels per degree in the fovea, along with full-dome aspheric lenses. Aside from the high-res visuals, the displays also deliver 200 nits of brightness, a 90Hz refresh rate, industrial-grade color accuracy (96 percent DCI-P3 color space), and local dimming to create striking contrast. Field of view is even more impressive, as it enables 120 degrees horizontal and 105 degrees vertical visibility, making it feel like you’re seeing the world directly through your own eyes, instead of viewing it through a digital screen.
They pair those visuals with dual 20MP front-mounted cameras that boast ultra-low-latency, so it can capture the scene in front of you and show it in the displays in real time, as well as LiDar depth sensing with a 23-foot range, allowing it to map the exact location of most objects within your periphery. Input from those sensors, along with the built-in eye tracking, power the device’s gaze-driven autofocus camera system that prompts the cameras to fix its focus on whatever the user is looking at.
The Varjo XR-4 can be worn with glasses out of the box, with no need for special prescription lenses, complete with automatic IPD adjustment. It has built-in speakers with DTS 3D spatial audio, so you get detailed sound playback with proper directional cues, along with noise-cancelling microphones to enable clear two-way communication. Each headset is bundled with Razer’s VR controllers, which you can use to interact with the virtual worlds, although they can also ship it with Steam VR controllers instead for customers who prefer that.
Three editions of the headset will be available. The Standard Edition has most of the detailed features other than the gaze-driven autofocus system, which is only available for the more expensive Focal Edition. There’s also a Secure Edition that’s been modified for government-grade compliance, which, we imagine, is what the military and defense companies use.
Pricing for the Varjo XR-4 starts at $3,990 for the Standard Edition and jumps up to $9,990 for the Focal Edition. Unlike in previous years, the outfit is actually selling their headsets to individual users now, with shipping currently available for EU, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
