StarVR just got one step closer to reaching the retail market with Acer and Starbreeze (the studio that brought you Payday 2) signing a letter of intent to form a joint venture to design, manufacture, promote, market and sell the premium VR HMD.
Starbreeze took a spare-no-expense approach to virtual reality, designing the StarVR HMD as a premium device, intended for the best possible VR experience. It features two 2560 x 1440 displays (one for each eye), offering a higher resolution and range of vision than what we currently see in the likes of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Other premium features, such as Tobii's eye-tracking sensor technlogy, are also planned to be integrated into StarVR HMD.
When we had the opportunity to try StarVR for ourselves, we noted that it certainly looked the part, but that the Nvidia GTX Titan X (the top dog in the GPU hierarchy at the time) struggled to churn out the 60 fps that the demo was producing and that it would be a while before graphics processing would catch up to the high-end VR device. However, the impending arrival of the Pascal-based GTX 1080 (which claims to offer twice the performance of Titan X) could enable StarVR to reach that comfortable "no-puke" 90 fps target framerate.
Although the announcement is merely a letter of intent used to form the basis for ongoing discussions regarding a definitive agreement, it's a big step for StarVR, and the manufacturing prowess of Acer could drive the product to a retail release sooner than originally anticipated.
Updated 5/16/16, 9:22am CT: A change was made to clarify Tobii Eye Tracking as a planned feature. It is not currently integrated into the StarVR HMD.
Derek Forrest is an Associate Contributing Writer for Tom’s Hardware and Tom’s IT Pro. Follow Derek Forrest on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter and YouTube.