Immersed showed a 3 minute walkthrough of Visor's software features, seemingly working.
Who Is Immersed? What Is Visor?
Since 2020 Immersed has offered a free app now available on Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, Vive Focus, and Pico that shows your PC monitor in VR and lets you spawn entirely virtual extra monitors, for up to 5 monitors in total if you pay. The Immersed app supports Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Visor is a new headset fully designed around this use case, a lightweight streamlined device rather than a generalized headset for gaming.
Like Apple Vision Pro, it has a tethered battery and is primarily intended to be used seated. The battery also contains the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antenna.
Immersed says Visor features the XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, 4K micro-OLED displays, color passthrough, as well as eye tracking and hand tracking for a Vision Pro style gaze-and-pinch input system.
The walkthrough comes two weeks after Immersed showed only a skeleton display demo with no tracking to attendees of its first in-person event, including myself, raising concerns about the startup's ability to ship Visor preorders any time soon, and one week after it showed through-the-lens clips of the headset's software, tracking, and passthrough working for the first time.
David Heaney
In the walkthrough video, Immersed's Head of Content Joshua Kurikeshu starts by claiming that the screen of the connected laptop will "automatically appear" in front of you when putting on Visor, promising less friction for this use case than current standalone headsets - though Meta is working with Microsoft on a wireless solution with low friction too.
The walkthrough goes on to show Visor's UX (user experience) for moving and resizing virtual screens using hand tracking, with a gaze-and-pinch interaction system that looks conceptually similar to Apple Vision Pro's visionOS. Visor's software also allows for adjusting the curvature of virtual screens, a feature present in the fullscreen theater mode of Meta's Horizon OS.
Visor's software has its own theater mode, which like in Meta and Apple's operating systems dims the surrounding environment. Immersed also claims that, like Apple Vision Pro, Visor will support watching 3D movies. The over 150 3D movies on visionOS are provided by Apple TV+ and Disney+, whereas Immersed isn't yet disclosing a content partner for this.
Almost all of the three minute walkthrough takes place in a virtual environment, with only the last ten seconds showing passthrough. Immersed describes the passthrough as "high resolution", though it doesn't look particularly great in the video. We'll be curious to try Visor's passthrough when we get the chance.
Visor's passthrough, with some quality loss due to casting.
Assuming the walkthrough is real, which it looks to be, Immersed has demonstrated that Visor is a working device with system software, not a mockup, though the software may be in its early stages. Whether it can actually mass produce the headset any time soon remains the biggest open question now, and we'll continue to track the startup's progress towards this goal.
My colleague Ian Hamilton tried Visor near Meta Connect last week, and should have impressions up soon. But the software he tried wasn't as far along as what's seen in this walkthrough video, and we still don't recommend preordering a Visor until we or another trusted source independently tries fully functional hardware and software.
