Somnium VR1 hands-on: a high-res headset for simulators

Last week I was in Prague at Somnium Connect to see the launch of the Somnium VR1 headset. I’ve also been able to try the headset for around half an hour, so I would like to tell you my first impressions about it. Does it live up to the hype? Discover it in this post!

Somnium VR1

The Somnium VR1 is a new PCVR headset that is offered by Somnium Space, the same company behind the eponymous social VR web3 application. The headset has been specifically thought for PCVR people who want a very premium headset to upgrade their HTC Vive or Valve Index headset and who don’t want to compromise on anything.

The first keynote at Somnium Connect was all about this headset and the various slides highlighted how the company tried to offer as much performance as possible on all the features of the headset. As you will see in the remainder of this article, the headset features high resolution, high FOV, high-quality passthrough, eye tracking, hand tracking, SteamVR tracking… everything that a PCVR enthusiast wants. This attention to quality is also verifiable in the QA process the company follows: Somnium VR1 is one of the very few headsets fully assembled in Europe (the headset is manufactured in Prague by VRgineers, the company behind the XTAL headset) and it has a very strict QA process on all its components. For example, screens with even minimal defects are discarded so that to guarantee the best visual quality possible to its users.

But as the adage says, “There’s no free lunch”, so all this obsession with quality and high specs results in evident compromises on other important sides like the headset size, weight, and price. These are probably features the target market of this headset does not care about, but that I, as an independent reviewer, should talk about. When speaking with Artur Sychov, the CEO of Somnium Space, he told me that this is a headset for PCVR enthusiasts who want the best performances: people who are not at their first or second headset, and who know exactly what they want.

Let’s see if this can also be what YOU want…

Specifications

• QLED Mini-Led Fast LCD Displays
  • 2880 x 2880 pixels per eye
  • 72/90/120/144(experimental) Hz framerate
  • 210 nit brightness
• Dual-lens aspheric modules (two lenses per eye)
  • 35 PPD peak fidelity
  • Horizontal FOV 130°, Vertical FOV 105°
  • IPD adjustment range: 58mm – 76mm
• RGB passthrough cameras
  • 4056 x 3040 pixels per eye
  • 125° x 100° FOV
• Weight: 700g-850g (depending on the variant)
• USB type-C connection (6m cable)
• 3.5mm audio jack
• 2x Integrated microphones
• 3x USB-C port available on the headset
• 120Hz eye tracking (optional)
• Ultraleap hands tracking (optional)

Design

The Somnium VR1 headset has been designed to be fully modular and customizable. Artur was very proud to say that the whole device is assembled without using any glue (with the exception of the lenses for obvious reasons) so that it can be fully opened and modded by expert users. This has been proven in the teardown of the headset he did himself:

Customizability is one of the main features of the device and it influenced its full design: for instance, there are 4 anchor points where 3D-printed accessories can be attached to the headset. To allow for easier creation of these accessories, the headset does not hide, but explicitly shows where there are the SteamVR sensors, so accessories designers have an easier life in verifying they are not occluding them.

Modularity is also what allows the company to sell 8 variants of the headset without making a mess: since the headset is thought since the beginning to be modular and customizable, the 8 variants are just the same headset with some modules added or removed.

This headset is so very “practical” and aimed at an audience of “hardware hackers”. Its visual design reflects this attitude: the headset is very squared, doesn’t shine away from showing its screws, and has a very techie look. You can see this in the pictures I took of it from all sides (sorry for the low lighting, the event venue was pretty dark; and sorry if the photos are related to two different headsets):

The visual design that Somnium chose for this headset is coherent with its target market, so it makes sense. But if I have to express an opinion based on my personal taste, I’m not a huge fan of it. The headset appears a bit bulky (the shoebox design is back) and a bit rough, and it doesn’t make you look very cool while wearing it. It looks to me more like a bit of a return to the past, like to the HTC Vive, than a peek into a future where headsets are small and feel like pieces of apparel we wear on the face. I’m more of a fan of curvy and small headsets… but again, this is my personal taste.

Visuals

Visuals are the most important things to talk about, considering the purpose of this headset.

I’ll start speaking about the good side: the display panels are crazy good. When I put on the headset and tried the simulators, I was immediately positively surprised by the high definition of everything. The resolution was great, and the colors and brightness were also very good. I tried in every possible way to see the pixels, but I wasn’t able to do that: only if I focused on some white regions surrounded by colored regions and put my eyes under heavy strain to see the pixels, I could see a “disturbance” in the color caused by the pixel grid… but I have never been able to see the grid itself. This means that the screen-door effect has gone away and this is good.

The FOV was large and immersive, too. Being used to my Quest 3, the visuals on the Somnium VR1 felt “larger” and more immersive thanks to the more available peripheral vision. I have to say that the FOV didn’t blow my mind: having tried in my life very large FOVs like the one of XTAL-3, I’m used to seeing even more. But still, it is large enough to make everything more immersive than the most popular headsets on the market.

As I’ve said before, Somnium Space has put a lot of attention on the displays and this paid off: they are simply beautiful.

But displays are not the only thing that counts in an optical system: the lenses are a very relevant component as well. And the aspherical lenses of Somnium VR1 have some pros and some cons.

On the pro side I can for sure mention the quality and the definition: the lenses can preserve the high definition of the screens, and according to Somnium, they could also support higher-definition screens (up to 4x the current resolution). They also feature a pretty generous eye-box: this means that even when I’ve not worn the headset perfectly, like during my first demo, I could still see the VR visuals with amazing definition.

But on the con side, I would mention some artifacts they had on the visuals. First of all, the very far peripheral of the vision on the left and the right is affected by chromatic and spherical aberrations which are very visible. Luckily this only affects the very far peripheral vision, so it does not disturb you much while you play. But then I also had some “weird visual effects”. I had the sensation that all the visuals had like a very subtle warping, which gave me some weird vibes while I was rotating my head. Plus in some moments I felt like looking at specific points in the scene, those parts had like a slight blur, which put my eyes at strain trying to focus more on them. I thought I was crazy to see this, but then another technical guy who tried the headset said to have the same sensation as me (while others claimed not to have noticed this).

When discussing these drawbacks with Artur and with other reviewers (e.g. Tyriell Wood, Scott Hayden, etc…), they told me it may be a problem with the aspherical lenses. Aspherical lenses in VR headsets have many advantages but also some weird behaviors. Artur told me you need a couple of days to get used to them: after this training period, you can enjoy all the advantages of them, but before, you may see some artifacts in your vision. Since the main headset I’m using now is a Quest 3, which uses pancake lenses, I am not “trained” enough to use the Somnium VR-1 at its best. The only thing I can do for the sake of this review is report what I saw with my eyes and what can be a possible explanation for my concerns.

Comfort

Somnium VR1 was quite comfortable to me, even if it is hard to express a full opinion on comfort when 3 out of 4 demos were on simulators where I just sat down on a chair.

The headset felt quite balanced on my head, maybe a bit front-heavy, but not as much as it would seem by looking at a picture of it. The problem is that at 700-850g it is quite heavy by itself, so even if it is balanced, your neck feels the weight of it. For playing simulators, it should be fine, but I guess that if you had to play an action game with many fast body movements, you would need regular breaks to make your neck rest between the various gaming sessions.

The fitting mechanism is the same as many other headsets: there is a top strap that you have to adjust to the size of your head and a lateral strap with a knob on the back that you have to rotate to tighten the HMD around your head. To balance the headset at its best, I suggest you have the rear part with the knob on the lower part of your nape. The padding on the facemask and the nape were good enough that I didn’t feel any discomfort on my skin.

The headset features no eye relief knob, but it features mechanical IPD adjustment and the lenses have a very generous eye box: this ensures that most people should have a comfortable visual experience with it.

Tracking

Somnium VR1 uses SteamVR for positional tracking and it works very well, as usual. I tried the demo of Half-Life: Alyx with Index Controllers and I had zero issues.

Hand tracking is provided by Ultraleap, which is the gold standard in the industry.

Eye tracking is developed in-house by Somnium Space, but I can not speak about how it works, because there was no demo highlighting it.

Audio

The headset features a 3.5mm jack or a USB-C port for your headphones and two integrated microphones. The demo setting was not the best for evaluating audio quality, but anyway, when I was provided headphones, the audio seemed good to me.

I’m very surprised this device does not offer integrated audio speakers. Considering its target market, I would have imagined Somnium offered over-the-year speakers a la Valve Index. I seriously think that Somnium should work on providing a “Deluxe Audio Strap” for this headset (like Bigscreen is doing with its Beyond headset) because it is weird to me to see a VR HMD in 2024 without integrated audio.

Input

Somnium VR1 is to be attached to your PC, so you can use every input peripheral on your PC (e.g. mouse and keyboard) to interact with your VR content. Plus, being a SteamVR headset, it can work together with all SteamVR accessories and controllers.

Inputwise, there is any way a little cool feature that I want to highlight: on the top of the headset there are 4 buttons that are fully customizable according to your needs. You can use them as shortcuts to activate something: for instance, in the demos at the event, the first button on the left was used to activate/deactivate the passthrough. I love this idea, but these buttons have a little problem: they are quite sensitive. When at the event I tried to use my hands to adjust the headset, sometimes I ended up activating the passthrough because my index finger was touching the first button. You have so to be a bit careful about them not to trigger unwanted things when you are just touching the device or putting it on.

Passthrough

With much respect with Somnium and the effort it carried on to organize this event, I have to say that the conditions to try the passthrough were really bad. The room of the event was quite dark, so it was challenging to enjoy all the beauty of such a high-definition passthrough. Only one of the demos offered the passthrough and was the plane simulator running DCS (Digital Combat Simulator), a software that is so resource-hungry that probably would run choppy also on an NVIDIA RTX8090Ti, and for sure this wasn’t helpful for the passthrough showcase either.

Anyway, trying to abstract away all the issues of the presentation, I can reliably say that the definition of the passthrough is as very good as advertised. In the demo, I could see myself flying on a plane in VR, but the physical cockpit was shown to me in mixed reality. I was able to see very well even all the little writings in front of me. I loved it. But to guarantee such a high definition, which is very important for the simulator use case, Somnium is not applying any depth reconstruction (a la Quest 3), so the passthrough elements appear slightly out of scale when compared to their physical counterpart. For instance, my hand appeared slightly smaller to me, and also it appeared to deform a very tiny bit while I was moving it back and forth from my eyes.

I also had the sensation that there was a very little lag from when I moved my hand to a place to when I saw the hand in that place. It was a very short and subtle lag, but my brain could perceive it. It seems no one else in the room had the same sensation, though. I would like to try the passthrough of the headset in better conditions to see if I would still see that.

Other features

Some other interesting random info:

• Somnium VR1 has reportedly a setup program that installs everything you need to use the headset (e.g. if you have the version with hand tracking it installs you the Ultraleap runtime)
• All the data of this headset is open: the developers have full access to the passthrough camera stream and eye-tracking data
• Eye tracking has been developed in house and the code has been open-sourced
• The cover of the cable is on a special material that makes it more difficult for it to get tangled

Price and availability

Somnium VR1 is a device on the market, and you can buy it on the Somnium Space website. At the time of writing, the expected shipping time for an order placed today is October. The headset comes in 8 variants (the following list courtesy of Mixed):

• Somnium VR1 – Classic Edition | VR only – €1,900
• Somnium VR1 – Striker Edition | VR & hand tracking – €2,300
• Somnium VR1 – Visionary Edition | VR & eye tracking – €2,500
• Somnium VR1 – Titan Edition | VR, eye tracking & hand tracking – €2,900
• Somnium VR1 – Specter Edition | VR, hand tracking & passthrough – €3,100
• Somnium VR1 – Ultimate Edition | VR, eye tracking, hand tracking & passthrough – €3,500
• Somnium VR1 – Translucent Limited Edition | Ultimate Edition with a transparent look – €3,900
• Somnium VR1 – Military Edition | VR, eye tracking, hand tracking & passthrough (TAA-compliant) – price unknown

The fact that you can customize the headset according to your needs is very cool and it is one of the strong points of this product. You can buy Somnium VR1 in all these variants on Somnium Space’s official shop.

The price for such a device is very high because it is a headset for a very small niche which wants very high performances. So it’s a premium headset sold at a premium price. I think the price is a bit too high even to be a premium headset, but I guess there are some business reasons behind it: the smaller the market, the higher should be the price to make the business sustainable.

Final considerations

I could spend only around 30 minutes with the Somnium VR1, so I can not reliably say if this is the ideal headset for you or not. And my opinion becomes even more complicated to express considering that I had not enough time to get used to the aspherical lenses. But from what I saw, I think that Somnium VR1 is a great headset to be used in simulators.

What counts in simulator games is especially a high resolution and a wide FOV, and Somnium VR1 delivers them very well. For enterprise uses, it is also important a high-definition passthrough and also that one is included in the package. In my opinion, both prosumers with a big passion for simulators and racing games or enterprises (or military groups) that need to train their pilots could find great value in this headset. Also, prosumers and companies that need a highly customizable PCVR device may love it.

Regarding the general VR audience, I don’t think this is the headset average people should look for: it is too expensive, heavy, and technical. Quest 3 is the best headset for these people. And general PCVR people may be happy to buy a cheaper Bigscreen Beyond or Pimax Crystal Light. This is more of a headset for those who are ready to spend a lot of money to have the highest clarity possible.

In this current stage of VR (after ten years in the field, I have to admit we are still in the “early days”), no headset is perfect. And Somnium VR1 has its defects as well: it’s heavy, it has some visual distortions, it has no integrated audio, and the passthrough is not depth-corrected. But notwithstanding this, I left with a good impression of it, because it is a headset that is built with good quality, and delivers impressive clarity both in VR and in MR. It has been built with a clear purpose and delivers for that purpose. And I love its openness and customizability. So if this is what you are looking for and you have a budget to spend, go buy it. Otherwise, consider the other options in the market.

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As usual, my comments section is open to any questions you may have on this headset. And if you want to make me a bit happier, consider registering for my newsletter or donating to my Patreon!

(Header image by Tyriell Wood)