Yesterday's Immersed IRL event in Austin, Texas was a big moment for the company to showcase its upcoming headset and build confidence that it's on track to deliver on the promise of an ambitious headset — but a botched demo may have done the opposite.
Guest Article by Eric Liga
Eric Liga is the Principal Scientist at Net Edge VR, a Houston-based company specializing in creating VR educational software. He has run the Houston VR Meetup for the past decade and was the programming director of the Immersive Technology Conference, one of the first conferences focused on the use of AR and VR in business and industry. He has presented on VR at NASA, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, the Houston Global Health Collaborative Conference, and many other industry events.
Immersed IRL drew attendees from all over the world. I waited in line with a pre-order customer from Japan, another from Canada, a journalist from the UK, and others from a dozen different US states, all eager to try out the company’s upcoming Visor headset. The long wait would have ended in disappointment and frustration for many, but it was tempered somewhat by widespread hope that Immersed could eventually deliver on its promises.
Visor is an ambitious, productivity-focused headset designed by Immersed, a small, formerly software-only company, in collaboration with a number of industry partners. It’s designed for a largely unmet use case: doing ‘desktop productivity’ work to leverage the limitless space that VR provides, but with a lightweight, comfortable, socially acceptable, high-resolution headset.
While the Apple Vision Pro is largely designed for productivity (Apple even coined the term “spatial computing” to emphasize its productivity and “computational” focus), it misses the mark in a number of ways. Its hefty weight and front-heavy balance make it uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. Its size, shape, and the creepy valley eye simulation on the front of the headset will make many users wary of wearing it in public or social settings. Add to that its eye-watering $3,500 price point and the fact that only Apple laptop and desktop users get all the productivity benefits, and it's easy to see why there's interest in bringing a competitor to market that makes some other compromises.
Revealed on stage by Immersed founder Renji Bijoy, the Visor's final hardware design has a slim form factor and weighs around 185 grams (less than a third of the weight of the Apple Vision Pro).
From the front, it does a credible job of looking like a pair of slightly oversized sunglasses. The illusion is less successful from the side because of the width of the optics, but it’s at least close to something a user could wear to work at a coffee shop without drawing too much attention. Its screens have a slightly higher resolution than the Apple Vision Pro, and are designed to allow it to simulate five large 4K monitors in a virtual or mixed reality workspace. It ditches the handheld controllers for eye tracking and hand tracking for all interactions not handled by mouse or keyboard.
The connected battery (which also houses the headset’s wi-fi and Bluetooth hardware) can be placed on a desk while working, slipped into a pocket while collaborating on a virtual whiteboard, or completely tucked away when connected to a PC. The inclusion of radio-emitting components in the optional battery pack means the headset (with a few other tweaks) could be suitable for use in high-security military and government facilities—a potentially lucrative market.
The headset itself costs $400 (but will rise to $500 after October 1) and is supported by a one- or two-year subscription to the Immersed software ($40/month for 2 years or $60/month for 1 year). That means the total cost is much higher than it seems, but it does make the upfront cost more reasonable. With the subscription included, the total cost of $1,120 to $1,460 makes it more than twice the price of a Quest 3 but less than half the price of an Apple Vision Pro.
While the Visor is often shown with over-ear stems like sunglasses, it will ship with a head strap designed to better balance its weight and increase comfort. Bijoy has been clear about the fact that the stems are there to help non-VR users get more comfortable with the idea of wearing a headset. It expects users to switch to the strap for long-term, daily use, and has said that future versions may not include over-ear stems at all.
The prospect of a high-quality productivity headset being made at a reasonable price by a small software company has created an understandable mix of excitement and skepticism in the VR community. Immersed IRL event intendedlargely to show that the company could deliver on its ambitious promises. But it could also be the opposite.
At the end of the keynote, Bijoy said that the headsets were being updated to new firmware and that the promised demos might be delayed a bit. At 11:00, I headed to the demo line, scheduled to be part of the first group of demos. At 11:30, a group of Immersed employees, looking agitated, quickly made their way through the crowd with their headsets covered in Styrofoam, disappearing behind the black curtain that closed off the demo area.
We waited patiently for the next few hours, getting occasional hints from event staff that setup was still underway and that demos would begin soon. Finally, a voice over the intercom announced that the demos had begun, but software issues meant they would be “hardware only” demos.
This means that we could end up with: To look And to handle headphones, and even being able to put them on our heads to get a feel for the comfort and weight. But neither headset would actually be on. I asked if we could at least turn them on to see the quality of the screens, even if we couldn't get them to work in a proper virtual environment, but the answer was no. Questions about when a real demo might be possible—later today? Tomorrow?—were given with discouragingly noncommittal answers.
I finally got my hands on one of the headsets and tried to learn as much as I could without seeing it in action. It actually weighed less than any headset I've tried except for the Bigscreen Beyond; it felt more like a strangely heavy pair of sunglasses than an XR headset.
It wasn't as comfortable on the bridge of my nose as I'd hoped, but once I pressed down slightly on the stems to take some of the weight off the front (as would the included but as yet unproduced headband), it was reasonably comfortable enough to wear for an entire workday. The lenses appeared to be high quality (though I won't be able to fully evaluate these until the headset is fully functional), and the build and materials appeared reasonably good.
As sullen-looking attendees filed through the demo area, testing out the lifeless headsets, a single engineer worked feverishly in the corner. The light from his headset made it clear that he was on. A crowd gathered to watch him from just outside the demo area, and an armed guard occasionally asked them to step back as the time approached for the event to vacate the venue.
With less than half an hour left in the event, the engineer ran into a demo station with a headset and a few people were taken back in. We were each given a minute or so to try out the headset… but it still wasn’t quite what we expected.
The visor displayed a series of images and videos, but it spread the image across both eyes without adjusting for stereo overlap. This meant the only way to view without discomfort was to close one eye. There was no head tracking or virtual environment, just a video playing directly to the screens.
From what I could see, the optics looked very good, with high definition, a relatively large sweet spot, and minimal distortion at the edges when the earpiece was properly aligned. The display itself looked vibrant, sharp, and very high-resolution. You couldn't make out individual pixels. It was hard to tell given the limited content and short demo time, but it appeared to be in the same league as the displays on the Apple Vision Pro in terms of resolution power.
While the cameras in the headset appear to be real, it was impossible to test transition vision, hand tracking, eye tracking, stability of location tracking, and many other critical features.
Once the software was up and running, I asked if I could come back to Austin for a proper demo, and was promised that I could. If such a demo happens, I'll have more to share.
After a brief and clumsy demo, Bijoy admitted that the Founders Edition headsets wouldn’t be shipping until shortly after the event (as initially announced). While the hardware is close to final, there was nothing shown to give me confidence that the necessary software was anywhere near completion.
The Immersed team seems genuine in their intentions to release the Visor, and their goals and design choices look good to me. However, I will hold off on ordering until I see signs that the software is stable, nearing feature completion, and that the promised features are working as intended. I will be monitoring their progress closely, as I am sure their financial backers and pre-order customers will as well.