Dell has a wired Windows Holographic VR headset on the way this year, but its future holds a standalone device too.
That’s what Liam Quinn, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at the company told me during CES last week. Quinn said that the company is doing a lot of internal work right now on VR ready PC hardware, looking into areas such as refresh rate of displays, necessary memory capacity, and processing capabilities. He also said that the company believed inside-out tracking was the future of VR, and that Dell was looking into it.
That includes work on its upcoming Windows headset, which is built on the HoloLens reference specs, and its own inside-out tracking prototypes. “As with with any new emerging space, it’s always ripe for innovation,” Quinn said of the work Dell was doing beyond using Microsoft’s blueprints. He noted that the company was “bullish” about advancing features like inside-out tracking.
When I asked Quinn if Dell would have its own standalone VR headset as a product in the future he said that it “absolutely” would. “You can anticipate that wireless capabilities will be in our future,” he added.
“I think the implementation and innovation of how it’s done will be unique and different for Dell.”
That wireless future could well also include a headset that still connects to a platform like a PC. “We believe there’s other ways to actually have modular compute capabilities that’s aren’t on the headset but allows that flexibility to be untethered from your platform whether it’s a mobile work station, a desktop, a gaming box or whatever,” Quinn said. This sounds similar to solutions like TPCAST that we’ve seen in recent weeks.
As for the Windows Holographic headset, Quinn suggested it will offer a “premium” experience when I asked him where it would sit on the sliding scale of specifications Microsoft has told us to expect. He declined to share specs or cost, other than saying it would be available “at the right price point”.
Dell sadly didn’t have much to share on the VR front at CES other than some new work stations, but from the sounds of it we could be hearing a lot more from the company going forward.
