Microsoft and Magic Leap aren't the only companies working on augmented reality headsets. Much like the way Valve opened up its development process for the Vive to a wider market of hardware developers, Microsoft has partnered with a few firms to held seed the market for augmented reality hardware and content. One of those partners is Acer and it's come along so much, that we could see it launch its first iteration of its AR headset in March.
These are only developer kits of course and are in a reasonably rough state, but they show that the industry of Augmented Reality is progressing. At a slower rate than the virtual one for sure, but it's getting there.
The headset is said to have two 1,440 x 1,440 liquid crystal displays, with a refresh rate of 90Hz. While getting higher frame rates isn't as important for AR as it is for VR, it's still handy to prevent your brain from deciding you might be poisoned and starting those old feelings of nausea.
The headset connects up to your PC via HDMI 2.0 and USB 3.0, with a built in set of headphones and a microphone through a 3.5mm jack. This is a little different from Microsoft's Hololens, as that doesn't require a PC connection and uses on board processing. This should mean Acer's headset is far cheaper, but does suffer from the problem of wired tethering to a desktop.
It's expected to cost around $300, which is just 10 percent of the current price of Microsoft's Hololens developer kit.
Getting cheaper headsets out there will hopefully help software developers start to create more content for Augmented Reality, which in turn seeds the marketplace for other headset makers. It's the classic chicken and egg scenario of software and hardware and Acer will start playing its part in that over the next few weeks.
To speed up that process though, anyone who attended the Game Developer Conference with a Microsoft golden ticket will be getting one for free. Not bad for a goody bag gift.
