According to the press release in Global Newswire - Immersed is going public through a merger with Maquia Capital Acquisition Corp.
This is exciting news for us long-time users of the platform, as this will bring the capital needed to move forward with their planned AR Glasses, named Visor, and an AI initiative that is yet to be publicly presented that apparently is named or code-named Curator.
Disclosure: I am one of the people who work over 30 hours a week in the platform.
I have a Valve Index, and while I know it’s not top-of-the-line anymore, it’s a pretty nice hmd. However, as much as I’d like to ditch my physical monitors, the screens just aren’t high enough res for that. Additionally, if you like playing non-vr games like I do, VR adds additional overhead that decreases the game’s performance.
From what I’ve seen, Apple’s new headset looks like the only one that’d really have the resolution to replace physical monitors, and because it has its own built-in processor, it means you could run games, blender, davinci resolve, etc on your PC while your VR environment gets rendered on the headset. However, it’s expensive as fuck and I can’t see consumer-targeted devices coming out with similar specs for a while.
Resolution actually isn’t the major issue here, it’s PPD, or pixels per degree. This metric is what matters when you’re talking about the pixel density of a display when viewed through a magnifying lens. I have the Quest Pro and I can attest to pancake lenses being a MAJOR upgrade in terms of visual clarity, especially with text, but we’re going to have to wait for the next generation with microOLED before we can start seriously considering replacing our monitors.
Apple’s headset isn’t doing anything particularly revolutionary, especially not because it has an onboard processor. They’re just the company who made a big splash because of their name recognition and it being their first foray into XR. The Quest 2/Pro also have an onboard SoC with a CPU/GPU and can also do supersampling via Qualcomm’s “Super Resolution”. Additionally they also have incredibly high quality hand tracking which just got even better with the most recent update, now allowing hand tracking while holding controllers. I’m personally holding out to see what happens with the Quest 3 as I refuse to buy anything in the Apple ecosystem.
Immersed is developing their own headset. Also the Index is a terrible test case for a monitor replacement. It’s a great headset but the display is potatoe quality by today’s standards.