Early this year, at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2023, extended reality (XR) device start-up VITURE unveiled its mixed reality (MR) gaming mobile dock solution: the “VITURE 1.”
The XR device gained honours during this year’s CES Innovation Awards, following recognition via Fast Company’s 2022 Innovation by Design Award and TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2022 award.
Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, VITURE secured roughly $10 million in capital from a Series A fundraiser via BAI Capital and Verity Ventures – totalling the firm’s funding to $15 million.
Parallel realities, strange worlds, untold possibilities – go as far as your imagination will take you.
VITURE One is your gateway to infinity: The Future Is On View. 😎 Now shipping!
Watch now on YouTube: https://t.co/D0PuhSpt8q pic.twitter.com/l6KBAoxgCz
— VITURE (@getviture) February 8, 2023
This week, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of VITURE David Jiang sat down with XR Today to discuss the new device and how his firm reacted to current marketplace trends to debut an effective XR consumer device.
What is the VITURE 1 Product
The VITURE 1 product is a lightweight XR headset wearable for up to three hours. The firm designed its device to look like an ordinary pair of sunglasses, much like Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories device.
According to Jiang, the product allows wearers to stream media content on virtual screens up to 120 inches in size, with “sharp” image quality and “great” sound quality. VITURE secures its sound quality with built-in Harman speakers and spatial audio software.
Moreover, the device comes with eye distance dials that enable near-sighted individuals to operate a VITURE 1 product without requiring additional prescription lenses.
To ensure user privacy, VITURE 1 hardware uses reverse sound field technology, which means others cannot see or hear what a user is doing.
The VITURE 1 product can also allow a user to jump between AR and VR modes using electrochromic film displays, which quickly moves a user between a variety of passthrough and fully immersive visualisations.
The device also weighs in at 76 grammes, allowing VITURE to promote wearability and useability with its hardware. Jiang adds, “the key to getting AR glasses to the consumer market is to make it lightweight, wearable, and useful.”
The accompanying neckband is also a supportive computing device that covers battery and processing operations.
Jiang also explained:
With the neckband, you don’t have to pair it with any phone or computer. We don’t have the battery on the glasses. The battery is on the neckband. So, we support three to four hours of playback time. Also, in gaming, with this neckband, you can connect the device to your PS5, Xbox or PC. Moreover, with the cloud, you can play anywhere you want, you can play some cloud gaming services like X Cloud and GeForce Now. Also, we have Netflix, Disney Plus, YouTube, and any favourite streaming apps you want. We embed several games “local games” in the neckband as well. You can play some 3D movies, which is a really amazing experience. You can’t experience 3D movies other than at the movie theatre. But right now, you can experience that here.
Identifying Market Trends
Jiang explained that the VITURE 1 device reflects two core industry trends currently emerging within the XR space.
Jiang added:
So at the beginning, I think two trends were really important. First is the micro OLED. So the micro OLED is something that can make AR glasses as thin as possible. So right now, the micro OLED is point 49 inches, which is really small but still 1080p. We can get a very high resolution. 2nd is cloud computing because we have a 5G network ready and also cloud computing. The device can use computing power in the cloud. I think this trend won’t be reversed.
Moreover, the Co-Founder added that other immersive services, such as gaming and Metaverse applications, will operate on the cloud, meaning that hardware providers must secure cloud/5 G-ready options to enable immersive content distributors to harness emerging hardware fully.
Jiang also added:
There’s a possibility that none of the devices can achieve immersion and portability at the same time, so this [the VITURE 1] is the device where you can achieve both at the same time.
David Jiang also noted in comparison to other AR devices, such as the Magic Leap, the VITURE 1 does not require cumbersome additional equipment.
Jiang added:
There’s a threshold for the human body or the human face. If you design a headset or glasses above 100 grammes, you can only wear that for no more than 20 minutes. If you make something under 80 grammes, you can wear that for at least two hours, like two hours to four hours. It depends on different people’s tolerance. Some glasses, around 50 grammes, you can wear that all day long.
The VITURE rep noted that market feedback to the device was overwhelmingly positive, explaining the device’s Kickstarter campaign rose roughly $3.1 million – breaking records on the crowdfunding site.
Moreover, the 5000 backers who received a VITURE product are giving positive first-hand feedback.
Leveraging a Bespoke Operating System for the VITURE 1
The neckband computing device runs on a custom Android-based operating system (OS), which encourages various developers to design custom VITURE applications.
The bespoke Android OS allows XR developers to create VITURE applications that fully incorporate various smart glasses product elements – including 3D experiences and spatial audio.
By leveraging an interoperable Anorid OS, VITURE enables XR content developers to distribute applications based on a range of real-time 3D (RT3D) engines like Unreal or Unity.
