HP’s Refreshed VR Headset Is Gunning for the Vive Pro

It hasn’t been easy to find a decent VR headset with better specs than the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and a reasonable price. While the HTC Vive Pro offered higher visual fidelity, it’s also been quite expensive. Initially, just the headset cost $800, and that’s still the price tag for the complete bundle with controllers and other necessary equipment.

What does $599 (for the consumer version) buy you? Rather a lot. Base resolution is up to 2160×2160 for a pair of 2.89-inch LCDs, compared with the Vive’s 1440×1600. Everyone who has tested the Reverb has emphasized how lightweight and comfortable it is. The consumer version of the hardware will come with a cloth face mask you can wash, and the 90Hz refresh rate is on par with headsets from Oculus and HTC. HP has also adjusted the sweet spot for its displays and switched to square-shaped lenses with rounded edges to enhance the FOV.

“We went to asymmetric because it allowed us to lower the per eye FOV, which boosts the clarity a bunch and increases the sweet spot about 33 percent. Then we combined both eyes.” John Ludwig, a product manager at HP, told Tom’s Hardware. “Our binocular FOV for both eyes has gone up from 110 to 114 degrees, but we managed to boost the clarity because we lowered the FOV per eye.”

The controllers still use Bluetooth and haven’t changed from initial designs. The poor state of PC support for Bluetooth — plenty of desktops don’t even have it — drove HP to make a change to the headset design, however. Now, controllers synchronize with the headset, not the PC.

The reports coming back from users have been positive. While this is obviously an unveil event rather than a review, initial reports are that the HP Reverb is half the weight of the Vive Pro. If you’ve ever worn a VR headset, reducing weight is critical to making devices that can be worn for longer periods of time more comfortably.

The fact that HP is so obviously aiming this product at the commercial market, combined with its relatively high price ($600 is still more than we need VR to cost for mainstream adoption), is proof that consumers shouldn’t expect miracles when it comes to affordable, high-end PC VR headsets. It’s still not clear how strong the consumer market for VR is in the first place. But this is, at least, a meaningful step forward for image quality and overall performance at a lower price point.

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