Bad news for VR fans – StarVR One headset isn’t happening for the time being. The startup behind it is putting the project on hold. Owned by Acer and Starbreeze, the latter has taken the trouble to make the official, letter-form announcement of the StarVR Corporation going private. The project standstill may be related to the recent Starbreeze shift in corporate dealings.
You know us, always on the lookout for the new and the better. There are a few obvious ways Virtual Reality headsets could improve, and one of them is to widen field of view. Eagerly anticipating the Acer-Starbreeze combined Star VR One headset, we were promised the widest FOV our eyes have feasted on. But we will have to wait. The One is officially ‘on hold’ as Starbreeze ‘regret to inform’ us.
‘We believe it is the most responsible course of action to put the StarVR Developer program on hold’
the letter reads, ‘while our company is in the process of going private’. To be fair to the company in crisis, they are going through financial woes that could see the business moved elsewhere. The initiative that ‘StarVR should cease to be a public company’ is a few months old news, whose truthfulness is now the foundation of dubious future of StarVR.
Be that as it may, pressing the hold button on One, though a surprise, might have been anticipated by the industry savants. It comes at the pinnacle of what’s, to put it mildly, a poor period for StarVR Corp. The whole thing went downhill probably before any public thumps, of which we can name at least two. The first is the last month’s delisting of StarVR from Taipei stock exchange. The other is a more recent Starbreeze filing for reconstruction for the lack of liquidity. It is a move followed by the resignation of the company CEO, Bo Andersson. Apparently, the tough period for the Sweden-based Starbreeze, a 33% stakeholder in StarVR, blames the financial struggle to the poor sales of the recent The Walking Dead PC shooter game.
Tough times indeed for one of the dearest Virtual Reality hopefuls. StarVR One headset is marketed as both commercial and enterprise best, 210 degree horizontal FOV solution (leaning slightly towards the former). Refresh rate of 90Hz with the AMOLED 1,830 x 1,464 display are clear marks of a superior headset. But alas, the high hopes are for now drowned in the, clearly heartfelt, apology: ‘we understand that many of you were looking forward to purchasing the StarVR One headset, and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused’.
What will become of StarVR One headset is yet unknown. We doubt that the project of such a stature could implode. But then again, it could. It was already reported that the majority stakeholder in Acer has given only a three-months’ worth of patience before leaving the project altogether. Bad day for Virtual Reality fans, to be sure.
