Unseen Reality’s Kickstarter raised almost $1.3 million for URXR One, a 93-gram ultralight VR-style passthrough headset that acts as a virtual monitor.
The Kickstarter campaign launched last month, and concluded over the weekend after reaching $1,288,712. By “VR-style” I mean that it uses pancake lenses placed between your eyes and the displays, and you see the physical world via the passthrough cameras on the front.
URXR One achieves its 93-gram weight mainly by not having much compute onboard and lacking a battery. It features the GravityXR G-X100 coprocessor chipset announced back in December, and is essentially an implementation of GravityXR’s reference design. The chip handles positional head tracking, optical hand tracking, and camera passthrough using very little power and generating very little heat, leaving the rendering to an external device.
It features dual 2448×2064 micro-OLED displays magnified by pancake lenses to a field of view of 80° horizontal × 56° vertical (around 90° diagonal) at up to 90Hz refresh rate.
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You plug it into a laptop, phone, or other device that supports USB-C DisplayPort out (including handhelds like Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go) and it displays the input as a 6DoF virtual monitor floating in front of you positionally. The device accepts a 2560×1440 signal at 90Hz.
Essentially, URXR One as a product is the same proposition as Xreal and Viture glasses, a virtual monitor for your existing devices, but with a VR-style display system with passthrough instead of transparent prism optics, offering a much wider field of view. Even Xreal’s upcoming Aura device reaches only 70° diagonal, and other Xreal and Viture devices have a diagonal field of view of less than 70°, compared to the roughly 90° of URXR One.
On Windows and Mac, URXR’s software enables multiple virtual monitors alongside hand tracking controls for positioning them in space.
URXR One Kickstarter trailer.
Unseen Reality claims URXR One will start shipping to backers in October, and to new buyers in November, priced at $999. To display a connected smartphone, you’ll need the $69 Power Hub accessory, set to ship in December.
Some time after launch, Unseen Reality plans to add support for PC VR, letting it act as a SteamVR headset, but that functionality won’t be ready for when the device ships.
Of course, URXR One’s campaign is somewhat overshadowed by the repeated leaks of Meta’s next headset, codenamed Phoenix, which appears to have a similar form factor and may even be shown at Connect tomorrow. How exactly Meta’s headset will compare on price, and when it might launch, remains to be seen. But what seems clear is that URXR One won’t be alone in having this ultralight form factor.
