There are only a handful of professional VR headsets available in the market today for industrial applications but, the only one to receive a Red Dot Award for its design is Czech firm, VRgineer Inc.’s XTAL. Designed by Stedina Design Studio, the XTAL is an enterprise grade VR headset made for professionals in the automotive, architecture, industrial design, and training sectors.
The latest version of XTAL, showcased at CES 2020, comes with a host of technical upgrades. Most significant of which are the high density LCDs with 4k resolution per eye (making a total of 8k horizontally) giving a crystal clear view assisted by foveated rendering capabilities, improved lenses with a 180 degree field of view, and eye-tracking capable of running at 210 fps. That’s not all. It comes with an embedded Ultraleap hand-tracking sensor and conveniently connects to a PC via a VirtualLink cable. Oh, and did I mention that you can get an AR mixed reality module as an add-on? Pretty awesome, don’t you think? So impressive that the US Airforce has already placed an order for the latest headsets to train their pilots in simulations. The people at VRgineers have even designed a helmet-mountable version for such cases.
And that design! That ultra-cool futuristic design! The inspiration behind those faceted triangular motifs as well as the name of the product comes from – crystal structures made up of triangular grids – which are the core of computer graphics as well as virtual reality. XTAL stands for crystal glasses just like Xmas stands for Christmas, with both bringing cheer everywhere!
Designer: Stedina Design Studio for VRgineers Inc.
