On January 6th, Razer announced at the Consumer Electronics Show that they would be joining the virtual reality fad by creating their own headset – called the OSVR. OSVR stands for Open-Source Virtual Reality, and it’s designed to make VR as accessible as possible.
Third-party users will be allowed to build their own apps across a variety of operating systems, such as Android, Linux, and Windows. The OSVR will also support different game development softwares, such as Unreal Engine, Unity 3D, and even the Oculus Rift dev kit.
The OSVR headset boasts a 5.5-inch, 1080×1920 display with 60 FPS and 401 PPI, along with a 100-degree field-of-view and a sensor hub which includes a gyroscope, a compass, and an integrated accelerometer for movement tracking. The headset design looks similar to the Oculus Rift and the Samsung Gear VR (which is understandable since Oculus helped create the Gear VR), but does not appear to be any competition for the Oculus Rift or the Sony Morpheus at this time.
The OSVR software is available to some developers now for free, and public access to the software will be available later in 2015. The OSVR HMD will release this June in the US, and globally later in the year, with a price tag of $200.00. Those who are interested in registering for priority access to the OSVR Hacker Dev Kit can register their email on Razer’s website.
