Mellott's VR
ANTVR
I’ve been watching ANTVR since their Kickstarter in 2014. I didn’t back them because they were one of the first Chinese companies to do a VR HMD on Kickstarter. It seemed like being a Chinese company would give them even less accountability than a U.S. based company on Kickstarter. It probably makes no difference given Kickstarter track records. ANTVR did seem to have had a rough time on Kickstarter but they’re still at it.
I originally tried their first HMD at CES 2015 and it was borderline. It wasn’t the best but also wasn’t the worst. However, their square optics and gun controller make them stand out from the crowd.
I saw ANTVR again at CES 2016. They’re about to release a new HMD called Cyclop which includes a camera on the front looking down at the floor. What’s interesting is that the camera is for a room based tracker based on retro-reflective AR fiducial markers as seen in the image below. I’m impressed by this because it’s an easy and cheap way to gain room tracking for VR. Not the first to do this for sure as Intersense has been doing it for years, but the first I’ve seen for the consumer market. I was also very intrigued because I myself am using reto-reflective AR fiducial markers to do head tracking. To see this flipped down on the floor, with a camera on the head, to track a person walking through the room, while wearing a HMD, definitely grabbed my attention. They weren’t letting people try the Cyclop prototype unfortunately. An ANTVR employee was walking around their tracked booth and people could only watch and talk to another employee.
The ANTVR Cyclop HMD is interesting because it’s slated to be around $240 dollars US. The resolution is 1280×1440 per eye like Gear VR with a FOV of 110 degrees and 90 Hz update rates. It will include their IR camera to perform their room tracking called HoloDeck. For the price this is worth checking out no matter what. Hopefully it looks good visually. No mention of LCD or OLED. Lets hope it is OLED. I’m now intrigued by ANTVR and I look forward to monitoring their progress as they move forward with their Cyclop HMD and HoloDeck tracking system.
