Interview with VRgineers: we want to push XR forward, but we’re not manufacturing a consumer XTAL

Yesterday I have described you my journey inside VRgineers, an interesting VR startup, and my hands-on with its high-FOV high-resolution XTAL headset. The device represents a glimpse into the future of virtual reality and I especially appreciated the crystal clearness of the display. It also features some flaws, like for instance the weight, that is a bit too heavy. If you missed yesterday’s post, I recommend you to read it now before going on reading this interview.

Today I want to share with you the interview that I had with Marek Polčák, the co-founder of the company. It is very interesting because you can listen from his own voice how is developing a next-gen headset. And then Marek will also clarify us what we all are wondering about VRgineers: if it is true or not that they are working on a consumer version of the device!

As always, I will share with you the integral video of the interview, with the full transcription below, so you can listen to it in the way that you prefer. Enjoy!

So, Marek, present yourself and your company to my readers! (0:26)

I’m Marek. We are now here in Prague, in our offices, in our development headquarter… and I’m the co-founder of VRgineers, a company which decided to go after building the most precise, most immersive headset which focuses on industrial use cases, on professional users.

Why the name XTAL? Why the name VRgineers? (0:58)

VRgineers is just a shortcut for “virtual reality engineers”, because we all here are engineers, or the “masters of science”, PhDs, and so on… and XTAL is again…it means “crystal”. We always heard that our headset has crystal clear view image so we decided to go with that.

Describe briefly with your words what is this “crystal headset” (1:34)

So the headset has 180 degrees field of view, it has 2.5k resolution per each eye… you connect the display port, USB, and power and it works out of the box with many applications, as well as SteamVR.

What gave you the idea of starting doing such kind of super cool headset? Why have you started this adventure? (2:07)

I started because I actually tested, like everyone, the first generation of Oculus, and then the second, and so on… and I was expecting like better visual quality… [me too!] that’s what turned me down… and when I saw that it was not improving and I really needed such headset because we started here in Prague (doing something) like a virtual tour… so, we were selling tickets… so you put on the headset and you were flying like above Prague… and a lot of people didn’t like it as well as I because of the low quality of the headset. So, in the end, we decided to develop our own… and we found out that a real need for such a headset is in enterprises and in businesses.

And what kind of enterprises are usually your customers? (3:09)

Mainly transportation, automotive, aerospace, public transportation, and so on. They are using headsets to design cars… they are skilled in using immersive technologies… different kinds of, mostly based on data projectors… and they are switching, I would say, into virtual reality because it’s much faster to evaluate, it’s much faster to iterate, and therefore they are rolling it out.

I’ve just visited your headquarters and I have seen people working on different aspects of the HMD. So do you confirm that you are working on all the parts of this headset? (3:45)

Now, like in here we have the development of construction PCB boards, like electronics, as well as the software, and drivers, and firmware…and then we also develop and manufacture our own lenses, but these are done by our joint venture company which focuses strictly on the lenses development, and they are not sitting here with us.

You are doing most parts of the device… what are the difficulties of doing such an innovative project? (4:28)

The problem is that when you are trying to do something new, it’s state-of-the-art, and therefore you have to find a new way so to basically do that. So the typical scenario is that you use two high-resolution, high-quality displays and then you find out “okay I am not able to use any cable to push the data through“. But these are the challenges… or for example when we have our own lenses, we design our own distortion correction algorithms… and these are sophisticated algorithms… and again, when you do your own lenses, it is state-of-the-art work, so you are not able to look at the internet and find basically the formula that will suit you.

Why does it seem that only startups are innovating PC VR? HTC, Oculus, Sony are not offering headsets with big FOV and resolution… while you, Varjo, Pimax, are. Why? (5:38)

The big brands are focused on the retail market, so they have to sell literally minimum hundreds of thousands of units or better millions of units and of course, that means completely different processes in everything: development, design, and so on… and startups like us see the opportunity in niches, in special segments. I would say for us it’s automotive, aerospace simulations, learning how to fly, and so on… and here you will most likely have only tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers which is at the end a too small market to enter for big brands.

Every time that there is a headset on the market that is pricier than a Rift, people on the web complain a lot about its price. What is your answer to those critics… why is an enterprise headset so expensive? (6:58)

In the end, it’s because of the size of the market. If you have a big demand, you can scale up and make the technology very affordable, but we are not at that stage yet, so therefore the price of the headset… because we are using components that are not that mass-produced, that are state-of-the-art, they are much more expensive… and when you assemble it and build it again in smaller amounts, it gets even more expensive because you don’t have an assembly line producing thousands every hour. But, in the future, with the growing market, we expect that the price will go down for sure.

What is the feature that makes the XTAL shine in front of the competition? What are you most proud of? (8:01)

The visual clarity. The combination between the displays, and the lenses, and the algorithms that we are working on right now… because the idea is: the closer we can get to reality, that you are not able to tell what’s real and what’s not, the more use cases in enterprise environments and in businesses you can perform.

I tested your device and it has some problems for what concerns weight and image distortions. When will this problem be completely fixed? (8:39)

The distortion… it is good that it’s not a hardware issue, but it’s a software one and we are able to update it on the fly… so, basically, whoever buys a headset right now and still see the distortions, can expect that it will be fixed soon because it’s a software thing. Making the headset smaller and lighter is a long term goal… because we all want to have like slick glasses, that will provide an incredible field of view and amazing resolution, but that needs time, because you need to evolve on the display level, you need to evolve on the chip level, on the GPU level, on… everything.

[Yes, you and all other big FOV headsets are working on similar problems… even the Pimax is pretty big]

I remember that your company was making the Hero 5K, a headset that Ben Lang or Road To VR said that had a great display, but was really really heavy. Furthermore, it had a very game-inspired look. This new headset is a great improvement with regard to that previous iteration. Can you tell us about this journey from the Hero to the XTAL? (9:54)

Yeah, the Hero was more or less the prototype…the thing is that we wanted with the big eyes to crack the attention…. yeah which worked out, and a lot of journalists always took a picture of the Hero and so on… but the XTAL was designed based on the priorities from people in business who worked with it, so we knew that we needed to fix certain problems, we needed to make a headset as you said smaller and lighter, and we managed that, even though there is still a way to go in the future,no questions about that. So the main differences between those two are actually about making it convenient for our customers.

What are the lessons that you’ve learned during this journey? (11:40)

That one of the critical components, from my point of view, is really the combination “lenses, display, and algorithms” because then you build the rest around it… these three are our critical components. They are the heart of the headset and you need to spend a lot of time focused on each and every one of those parts… on sourcing the displays and testing them as I showed you today. We sourced a lot of different displays including very high resolution, including low resolution, LCD, OLEDS, but then you have to remeasure so you don’t over-promise and say “it will be this resolution” but then you will find out that the quality is actually lower than you expect.

Now, the question that everyone in the VR communities is asking. At a certain point, there has been this rumor regarding you contacting the famous VR youtubers that helped Pimax (like MRTV, SweViver, etc…) to create a consumer version of the XTAL. Then, on Reddit, there has been this answer of yours saying that is not true, because you can’t compete with big companies like Oculus. So… where is the truth? (12:46)

I contacted the youtubers, that’s true for sure. Also, what we are working on together is that I would like to learn the feedback of what the community of gamers that they are in touch with, and understand what it really expects from the next generation of gaming VR headsets… and that’s the first step. It is also true that we think that it will be very hard to compete with established brands in the gaming industry and therefore we believe that, to make it feasible, we will need to find the right partner. But we think that we developed interesting technologies, interesting IP, and we would like to provide it to the community and for that, you need to do it in a different way than selling only high-end high-resolution headsets to enterprises.

Let me see if I understood it well: maybe you’re not creating alone a headset to compete with Oculus, but maybe you could make it with a partner that can help you at scaling, using the technology that you developed for the XTAL? (14:38)

Yes. And first, before we start basically anything, we need to understand what are the expectations of the possible market and all the gamers.

What about AR and MR? I am a fan of passthrough AR… and I made experiments in this sense with the Focus… and I love the fact that you can actually modify reality. Varjo is producing a MR addon, are you also thinking about experimenting with that? (15:12)

Yeah, we even posted the information that we are working on an AR module, basically front-facing cameras… again, each headset needs, I would say, a little bit different module because of the different field of view, resolution, and so on, so we are building our own and we have a prototype…actually, it’s not like officially released… we are not showcasing it yet.

How do you envision your future? (16:17)

I would like to make the difference between retail devices and high-end ones much more visible, creating a bigger gap with improving basically everything we want to improve: visual quality, we want to get rid of distortion, we want to make a headset much smaller and make it suitable for more and more potential users… for like designers and construction guys and simulations and so on… so it will have a steady ground and move the whole technology forward because, as I said before, there was hype for VR and a lot of us expected that it will be much more advanced and easier but it takes time.

How is Virtual Reality in Czech Republic? (17:25)

In Czech Republic there is the history about VR, which is nice… because the currently most popular game, Beat Saber, has been developed partially here… then one of the most popular game on Oculus DK1, “Sightline: the Chair” was also developed in Prague, and just a few blocks from here are sitting the guys from LIV, who I really like and admire… warbling the window into virtual reality, so it’s being used mostly by youtubers like you, so you can project what you are doing inside VR.

How is Czech people regarding VR? How is the VR market? (18:28)

We are a small Republic, so the market here is not that big: our company is mostly exporting… okay, we have here the client Skoda, part of Volkswagen, a car manufacturer well established… and here are a few other companies which can use the technology from again transportation, energy field, as well as military.

Anything else that you want to say to my readers? (19:10)

I’m happy to host you here, to walk you through our development spaces, because I think it’s important to understand the process behind, as well as the history of VR, to understand where we are now and what are the possibilities… where we can get in a near time.

And I would like to send greetings to all of your listeners: I hope that you will experience XTAL in one of the following events around Europe. The next event right now is actually in the U.S., it’s Design and Manufacturing in California… and in Europe for sure AWE, VR days in Amsterdam in autumn, and some others that you can find out on our website.

Ok thank you Marek for kindness and good luck for XTAL!

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I hope you have enjoyed this long journey with me, thanks to which we got to know better VRgineers and its headset XTAL. And if it is the case, please like and share this post!