In the last few years, Virtual Reality headsets have taken off as a kind of 'next big thing' type of hardware. Oculus were the first to come to the gaming community's attention, with other people like Sony beginning to follow suit after. Now we've got an entry into the field from Razer with an open-source version.
Revealed yesterday at CES, it combines open-source software and hardware into an initiative named "OSVR" which stands for "Open-Source Virtual Reality" and there was already a headset to show off and for people to have a go with. The reason that they're aiming to make the project open-source (revealing every detail of the headset and the software that makes it work) is that they aim to accelerate the speed at which virtual-reality headsets, the software it uses and all related technologies are being developed because they're tired of the dev kit/prototype limbo it seems to be stuck in at the moment. In other words, if Oculus started the train, Razer are planning to increase the speed its racing along the track towards 'perfection'.
They hope that by having everything available to the public enterprising creators can develop their own methods of use and make improvements to the model they provide. They're even going to put together and make available what they call a "Hacker Dev Kit" and hopefully have it out for June.
The headset itself that was shown at the event used a 5.5-inch FHD display screen and used two pairs of lens, one concave and the other convex in an attempt to minimise edge distortion around the frame of your VR viewpoint. Otherwise technologically it isn't more impressive than any other showing, but as it's meant to be a platform on which others can build it doesn't really need to be.
Razer's taking a chance that their base headset will provide the means for someone to make the next big step in VR technology, and that could be just what is needed to make sure that virtual-reality headsets aren't just a temporary craze.