Starbreeze partners with Acer for StarVR headset

It’s sometimes easy to forget that Oculus, Gear VR, Vive and PlayStation VR are far from the only players in the virtual reality headset market.

Starbreeze announced the StarVR back at E3. Now it has revealed that Acer is its manufacturing partner. The pair will cooperate on the design, manufacturing, promotion, marketing and sales” of the device, which is still without a launch date.

StarVR’s USP is its wide field-of-view, which the company says covers around 75 per cent of a person’s natural FOV. It offers 210×130 degrees, compared to other headsets’ 100×100 degrees.

This is thanks to its total resolution of 5120×1440 (2560×1440 per eye). Such a large resolution will require a super-beefy PC to take advantage, however.

"Since our launch in June 2015, we have had an amazing start with StarVR. By partnering with Acer we shift gears yet again to firmly position us as the leader in top-end VR experiences. Acer is an excellent, experienced and prominent hardware partner that will accelerate us in realizing and producing a high-definition, high-fidelity VR headset," Starbreeze CEO Bo Andersson Klint said.

"We’ve been working with a clear roadmap for our VR strategy from day one, and are now about to realize one of the first major collaborations we set out to achieve. The future for StarVR is now set and extremely exciting."

Acer president and CEO Jason Chen added: "Acer is thrilled to join forces with Starbreeze in bringing the StarVR head-mounted display to the market. We are devoting R&D resources across multiple aspects of the VR ecosystem for a coherent and high-quality experience, while just last month Acer announced powerful desktops and notebooks fully-ready for StarVR. Starbreeze and Acer share the same goal of delivering best-in-class VR applications, and we look forward to unlocking new VR possibilities together with this partnership.”

Starbreeze announced last year that it is making a John Wick VR game.

Acer isn’t the only PC hardware manufacturer in the VR game, however. AMD also has its self-contained Sulon Q in development. Its USP is that it doesn’t require a PC, as all the necessary components are housed in the headset.