It’s the last day of 2019, and it’s time for every website to give awards about the best VR game, the best VR headset and whatever category that comes to the mind of the journalists. But no one ever talks about the worst, so to close the year with a smile, let me talk about the worst headset that I’ve tried this year. I don’t remember the name of the device, so I will rename it as “Potato 4K”. Let’s see how it has won this coveted award!
Me and the Potato 4K
I have discovered the Potato 4K thanks to my consultancy activity (if you need some advice or the development of an AR/VR product, contact me 😉 ). I visited a customer that was thinking about implementing VR into his business, and so he called me in his office to talk about it. He revealed to me that to investigate VR better, he had just bought 2 headsets to give virtual reality a try.
He took two packages of the same headset, just arrived from China, and gave one to me while he was trying the other one. Looking at the package, I immediately understood that I was looking at the future arriving directly from Shenzhen. A headset from a completely unknown Chinese brand, advertising it as 4K. Wow, usually, this is the premise for a disaster… but what happened later, was even beyond my expectations: it reached facepalm levels I didn’t even think were possible.
Design
The Potato 4K has the classical shoebox style of all modern standalone VR headsets. It is gray and black and seems inspired by the head of Robocop.
His great innovation is in the features embedded in the headset. On top of the device, you can see the turn-on button, the eye-relief dial, the navigation buttons, volume buttons, return button, volume buttons, and other dozen buttons. I guess that during the brainstorming session to create this headset, everyone stood up and said things like “Hey, but what if I would like to use my HMD as a gamepad?” or “Why don’t we add the controls to make possible for the user to open up the garage from the device?”, “And if the user wants to control the fridge from the headset?” and for every question, the others said, “Amazing idea, let’s add some buttons to make it possible!”. I wonder why they haven’t also added a keyboard, a mouse and a TV remote.
But I think that the brainstorming gave its best on the bottom side of the headset. There are 2 sliders to adjust the IPD, one for each eye (!! A feature that I have never seen on any other headset), an SD-cards reader, a 3-5mm jack, a USB-A port (??? Maybe since they haven’t embedded the mouse and keyboard, they left a port to attach them to the device) and another USB port. Basically, the Potato 4K has more ports than my laptop.
The final result is a headset that seems a mix between a GearVR, a laptop, a gamepad, and Robocop. There is so much crammed into this device, that I think that there are more electronics here than inside a Tesla.
Comfort
When you wear the Potato headset, you feel the great comfort that it offers. It takes all the rules of the ergonomics, and says “scratch that!” and makes all the opposite. The headset is uncomfortable on the face, next to the eyes and of course on the nose: it is made for Chinese people, so it really destroys my big Western nose (a bit like the Skyworth 4K). Of course, since it is full of electronics to let people use the headset as a gamepad, a remote controller and all the rest, it weighs 75Kg. If you think that the Quest is unbalanced, you have to try the Potato 4K to understand what “unbalanced” really means. It is basically a headset made to torture your face: it reminds you that at the moment, VR is just pain and fatigue.
My friend Rob Cole has written various articles to talk about the importance of ergonomics in VR (like this great one on the Valve Index). He highlights how every face is different from the other one, and that every one of us has facial asymmetries. I guess that the Potato company has read his articles because it has made the first headset with two sliders to move the lenses so that to adapt them to your IPD. This means that you can move the left and right lenses independently. You may think that this is a smart solution, but actually it is a true disaster, because of course, there is no software to help you during this tuning procedure… so you end up moving randomly the left and right lenses and finish with a misaligned view. Not only you feel pain on your face, but you also have double vision. Great!
Visuals
Supposed that you can survive with the headset on your face, if you turn it on, you imagine to be finally able to enjoy the Shangri-la of the 4K Visuals. Well, ehm, more or less.
As soon as you see the display, only 3 letters come to your mind: WTF.
The display is LCD, and we all know that this is a problem for the crispness of the images. But here the colors are not just washed out… are directly at the level that every color is similar to all the other ones. The black levels are inexistent, and the contrast is just on vacation.
The Field Of View is in line with all the top-level headsets on the market. I mean, the AR HEADSETS. Probably it was something like 50-60 degrees, with two enormous black vertical letterboxing bands to cover the classical 110° FOV. They must have heard that the Valve Index is so advanced in offering a big FOV that you see the black edge of the screen, and they thought that the more edge you see, the better, and so they offered 50° of black edge. Cool!
Ok, colors are terrible, FOV is terrible… but come on, it’s a 4K headset! 4K resolution, with the full-subpixels of the LCD, showed on 50° field of view should offer retina-like vision like Varjo, isn’t it? Well, ehm… cough cough. I guess that at this headset has worked Juyun Kai, the Chinese cousin of John Carmack. With his great expertise, he has managed in a tech miracle: being able to provide a noticeable screen-door effect even with a 4K headset with a little FOV! I couldn’t imagine it was possible. Really kudos to him, he’s a damn genius… we need these experts in the VR ecosystem in this moment.
But it is not over here. Juyun has made another fantastic miracle, this time with the optics. The headset has its sweet spot with your eyes at like 1-2 centimeters from the lenses. If you put it on your face, it is more blurred than if you keep your eyes at a distance. Probably he discovered that the headset is too heavy to be kept on the face, and thought it was a great idea to force you in keeping it with your hands distant from it. A new feature that I guess will be copied soon by… no one.
Tracking
There is no room-scale tracking. I guess they had to remove the tracking technology to make room for the 34 buttons that are on the HMD. The rotational tracking works like the one of OSVR, if you know what I mean.
Controller
Controllers are for suckers. Real pros put all the buttons directly on the HMD. This way, when you make demos, you don’t have to teach people how to use the controllers each time, but just instruct them to press random keys on the device. Or directly plug a keyboard on the USB port and provide it to your users. That’s why the Potato 4K doesn’t come with a controller in the box, it is a device that is beyond the future.
Software
The operating system, the Potato OS, is a modified version of Android. Modified in a bad way, of course. The UX has been designed by a cat walking on a keyboard of a Mac.
Provided that you can use it with the buttons on the headset, you can play some amazing games, like Gold Rush 9000. It is a 3D infinity run game, where you run forever on a road, and you have to collect some coins that are in front of you. Thanks to the 60° SDE, this game is less immersive than a game played on a Gameboy, of course, but let’s just focus on the game design for now. You keep running, and you should be able to move laterally to get the coins that can be on all the various sides of the road. But your character refuses to move most of the time, and basically does what it wants, because when you are in China, China decides for you. Pressing one of the various buttons on the device, your character can also shoot laser blast… amazing feature, if not for the fact that there are no enemies to shoot.
This game on this headset is an allegory of VR life, where you chase money all the time, never get what you wish, fight inexistent enemies and feel discomfort all the time. 10/10 for the philosophical meaning.
Price
If I remember well, price was around $150, basically the same price you could get a discounted Oculus Go on Amazon during Cyber Monday. But Oculus Go has still that old technology of the controllers in the end, so it is less advanced than this device.
Final impression
The Potato 4K has won the Worst VR Headset of 2019 award thanks to its amazing engineering innovations in providing bad design, ergonomics, visuals, and software. No other headset I have tried has managed in reaching these astonishing quality levels and I want to really compliment all the team working on it. I can’t wait for what they will be able to create next year!
I wish you a great end of the year and a fantastic new year in VR, hoping that your life will be better than the one depicted by the game Gold Rush 9000 🙂
(PS I would love to hear all the bad experiences you had as well with VR headsets! Let me know them in the comments or on my social media channels, so that we can end this year laughing together!)