All latest news about Microsoft VR Headsets: controllers, price, release date

Hello all! This week have been revealed a lot of news about the upcoming Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets, so I thought it could be a great idea making an article with a quick round up about them! Keep reading if you’re interested in this new virtual reality platform…

Crystal Keys Controllers

Don’t know if you knew that, but the VR controllers of Microsoft headsets are codenamed Crystal Keys (a cool name). Some super-special devs have already received them for testing and one of them, called Sean Ong, has made two interesting videos about them. In the first one, he shows the unboxing of these controllers

while in the second one he shows the controllers while in use.

From this video and from the reviews of these devices by Road To VR and Tom’s Hardware, it is clear that these controllers are good, but not great. Some points I want to highlight:

• They seem quite cheap products: they are very light and don’t seem that resistant. We all know that Oculus Touch are almost indestructible (unless you play Echo Arena) and that Vive controllers are solid. Well, forget this quality with these devices;
• They aren’t super comfortable. Oculus Touch controllers are very ergonomic (and the upcoming Vive Knuckles should be even better), while these ones don’t make the hand stay at a comfortable rest position. Furthermore, it is easy to press the Windows button by mistake and return to the home room while you’re playing;
• Buttons are many and this is great to offer a wide range of interactions;

• Tracking is solid while the controller is in the field of view of the cameras that are present on the headset. The field of view of these cameras is acceptable, so controllers don’t have to be exactly in front of the user, as if you were using a Leap Motion v1. Road To VR journalist noticed some little jumps in the tracking while using them, though…. but we’ve to consider that this technology is being updated each day, so I guess that by the official launch of these devices, all problems will be solved;
• Using IMUs on the controllers, the system is able to take care of tracking even if the controller exits from the field of view for one second or two (it makes some kind of predictions). If the controller stays out of the headset’s sight for too much time, tracking becomes unreliable and the system blocks the virtual controller position inside the VR experience and keeps only the rotation. When the controller returns in sight, tracking can restart. It has to be seen how much this behavior hurts the quality of the VR experiences (for instance, bow and arrow games are not possible);
• Controllers work using standard batteries. A set of batteries at the moment is enough for 8-10 hours of controllers usage;
• The overall VR system includes a Chaperone-like security system. It is polygonal and not only rectangular;
• These controllers and the relative software is being built very fast and there are a lot of updates: things may change until the day of the official release.

From what I’ve read, these seem to me good products for good-enough experiences in VR for the general public. Surely they can’t offer cutting edge VR experiences to gamers and innovators.

SteamVR Support

Talking about experiences, the real issue of Microsoft is that it has few applications you can play on its platform. Yes, they’ve made some partnerships with some studios, they announced some Halo experiences in VR, but surely they can’t compete with the great offer of Oculus Store or SteamVR.

That’s why Microsoft took an intelligent decision and partnered with Valve to make its headsets SteamVR compatible. Details on how this will happen are still not clear and we have to consider that some time ago Microsoft declared that its headsets would have worked only with UWP environment and so making them work with SteamVR would have been hard. The most probable (and even the most beneficial for the VR ecosystem) scenario would be that Microsoft and Valve write an OpenVR driver for these headsets so that to integrate completely these headsets into all the SteamVR ecosystem.

This is fantastic for Microsoft because this means that from the day one its headsets will be out, its users will be able to play with all the great games and experiences available on SteamVR (they’re a lot!). Redmond company has so solved its biggest issue about content. And is great for Steam, because this way Valve can count more users for its virtual reality apps store. And it’s great for us developers because developing with Unity and SteamVR we can target a lot of different headsets (Vive, OSVR, Microsoft, etc….)

And there’s more: if these headsets will be compatible with OpenVR… and ReVive makes SteamVR users play with Oculus games… will it be possible for Microsoft users to play Oculus games using Revive, too? This would be an awesome win for them… even if I think that playing Echo Arena with these cheap controllers is a big risk 😀

UPDATE: According to a Reddit post citing Microsoft sources, it seems that SteamVR support won’t be available at headsets launch, but will come later. Keep this in mind if you want to buy a MS headset.

Specifications

We already knew about specs, that are similar between all the various Microsoft Mixed Reality Headsets. Taking them from Road To VR, they are:

• Two high-resolution LCDs at 1440 x 1440
• 2.89” diagonal display size (x2)
• Front hinged display
• 95 degrees horizontal field of view
• Display refresh rate up to 90 Hz (native)
• Built-in audio out and microphone support through 3.5mm jack
• Single cable with HDMI 2.0 (display) and USB 3.0 (data) for connectivity
• Inside-out tracking
• 4.00m cable

As you can notice, the big innovations towards competitors like Oculus Rift or HTC Vive are:

• Inside-out tracking, that lets you use room-scale virtual reality with a super easy setup that doesn’t require external cameras;
• 1440×1440 resolution that is superior to the Rift’s and Vive’s one;
• A super-long cable

There are anyway points where these headsets don’t shine:

• FOV is little: 95 against the 110 of Rift and Vive;
• There’s no integrated microphone and this is terrible for social VR experiences;
• There’s still the cable. This is exactly as the other two headsets, but now VR is moving towards removing the cable by using standalone headsets or wireless-addons.

Again, the impression is that we’re talking about good-enough devices that aren’t performing any innovation, are just offering state-of-art VR at a cheap price.

PC Specifications

Microsoft has released new specs for PC running its virtual reality experiences:

What do these two columns mean? Well, the first one is the one that regards high-tier Mixed Reality PCs (Microsoft calls them “Mixed Reality Ultra PCs”), while the second one regards standard Mixed Reality PCs.

With both types of PCs, you can experience Microsoft mixed reality and this is a game changer, since as you can read even an Intel integrated graphic card can run a virtual reality experience! This is a big moment for VR since any decent computer becomes a VR-ready PC thanks to Microsoft. The difference between the two types is that with Ultra PCs you can have 90Hz virtual reality and run any app you wish, while with low-end PCs you have only 60Hz VR and can run only 3 applications simultaneously in the immersive Windows environment. This means that with low-end PCs you can’t live a great virtual reality, but you can enter VR anyway and this is awesome.

Anyway, Microsoft should release stickers on PCs to certify that they work with its VR ecosystem in Standard or Ultra mode.

Notice that we’re talking about user’s PC. Developers’ PCs should have higher specs, as follows:

A note on the Microsoft websites remembers us that laptops with hybrid graphics may have issues for development purposes.

Models, prices, and release dates

Road To VR has made a great list of the Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets models and release dates:

• Dell VR118: to be released in October, for $350 without controllers and $450 bundled with controllers

• Asus HC102: to be released in October, for €450 bundled with controllers

• Lenovo Explorer: to be released in October, for $350 without controllers and $450 bundled with controllers

• HP Mixed Reality headset: already on-sale in developer edition in the US for $329 without controllers (guess will be at $429 with controllers)

• Acer Mixed Reality headset: already on-sale in developer edition in the US for $299 without controllers (guess will be at $399 with controllers)

UPDATE: the exact date of launch may be October, 17th, that is when the Windows 10 Creators update will be released.

I’m very excited by this new wave of VR products that come with a new tracking technology that will make VR more user-friendly. What’s your impression about them? Would you buy them considering the fact that they cost more than the Oculus Rift without offering a better experience? Let me know in the comments! (And subscribe to my newsletter if you haven’t already done it…)