UPDATE: The Kickstarter project for VRGE got fully funded.
My home office isn’t the most organized place on the planet. To my left is my Blue desk microphone, which lets me record sultry smooth audio for stuff like this Resident Evil 7: Biohazard video review. To my right is a printer, but I have to unplug and move it off my desk if I want to set up extra Oculus sensors to use Touch. I’ve got my base stations set up in opposite corners of the room for the Vive. On the ground to my right, in a muddled heap, are the Vive headset, my audio headphones, the Rift headset, two Touch controllers, two Vive wands, and a bunch of cords.
Meanwhile, the living room is very nicely maintained. I’ve got the PSVR on a great Power A display dock with two Move controllers and a DualShock 4 (all charging) right next to the couch, the breakout box cord is stuffed into the entertainment center (where the PS4 Pro lives) when not in use. It’s very tidy. My PC area admittedly lacks that sort of organization, which is why this VR hardware display and charging dock from VRGE is particularly appealing.
We’ve seen a few different charging dock prototypes in the past, including from Nyko, but they lacked the polish, versatility, and sheer functionality of this offering from VRGE. You can tell from the video above and their Kickstarter page that they’ve mostly thought of everything.
You can order variations that are designed for either the Rift, Vive, or PSVR, and each edition has a spot to place the headset and its accompanying gamepads or motion controllers. The cord slides through the slit in the front, the headset rests in the middle, and the controllers stand on the sides. USB dongles are fed into the units for easy charging all in one spot.
Best of all is the creators even provide mounting hardware with each charging dock so you can neatly mount it on the wall next to your desk instead of taking up a big chunk of precious space. For a proper office or game studio it wouldn’t be as big of a deal, but at home, every inch of desk space feels like a rare commodity these days for me.
The folks at VRGE sent UploadVR two production prototypes, very similar to the ones shown in the video above, and I can thankfully report that it exceeded my expectations. It’s hard to judge build quality from a video, but the units were extremely sleek and attractive. They feel much weightier than they look, which is great considering they’re designed to support relatively hefty and expensive VR HMDs. The rubber feet on the bottom kept them still on my desk when not in use and the wall mounting process was very simple.
If you only have a single headset it’s a great choice if you’re not interested in a head bust for display. If you have multiple and want to wall mount your setups, then these are by far the best options available. As of the time of this publication, the Kickstarter still has 7 days to go and it’s sitting at just about half of the $30,000 goal with approximately $15,000 raised.
We don’t report on a lot of Kickstarters at UploadVR, but since this one is already such high quality and the production prototype feels close to a consumer product, we can’t help but recommend these charging docks.
