So you’re considering a virtual reality headset, are you? Printer and laptop maker HP are hoping to tempt you away from the more established offerings from Facebook-owned Oculus and the HTC/Valve collaboration known as the Vive. Their newest offering is called the Reverb and with it HP hopes that a better pair of screens will make you turn your eyes in its direction.
HP’s Reverb headset isn’t new. We saw it under a different name back in February this year, when it was still being referred to as Copper. Not much has changed, besides the specifications being confirmed. And availability information turning up, too.
Get your specs on
Reverb users are going to be getting a lovely 2,160 x 2,160 resolution to play with. That’s per eye, rather than a combined total, which is just dandy. The headset itself looks pretty darned lightweight to us (it should — it weighs about 500 grams) and HP has opted for a strange headband system. The company claims that the design will allow the Reverb to fit more heads than the sort you’ll find on Acer’s entry into consumer VR gear. We’ll see.
Those high-res display panels are 2.89in fast-switching LCDs, rather than the pricier OLED screens found in more expensive (but not by much) headsets. How they perform against that brain-melting screen-door effect is something that we’d like to see for ourselves, though.
And we probably will. The Reverb will be coming to South Africa. The HP Reverb Consumer Edition is launching this April and will set buyers back R13,000. For those willing to wait longer and pay more, the HP Reverb Professional Edition will be landing in May this year and starts from R14,500. The difference? The Professional Edition gets a 0.6 metre headset cable and a washable fabric face cushion. Both units will ship with motion controllers and the other cabling you’ll need to get up and running.
