While most VR headsets on the market are designed to be as immersive as possible, almost none have focused on being able to quickly switch to the real world. Simon Ljungblahd, a student from the Umeå Institute of Design, has come up with a design that seeks to counteract that.
Ljungblahd’s design consists of a visor that can be flipped up out of the way instead of an immersive display. Instead of blocking out your real-life environment, you treat the headset like you would a laptop. Except that the visor is capable of Augmented Reality (AR).
Other key features include a lightweight strap that slips on easily and a cable that connects to your computer. One particularly nifty part of the design is a screen on the front of the headset for others to look at. This screen indicates to everyone else what the user is currently doing.
Image credit — Umeå Institute of Design
A productivity-focused headset like this might be quite popular amongst office workers. But I personally can’t see a use case for this that AR glasses cannot already cover. Yeah, it’s a unique design. But glasses also keep you quite aware of your surroundings and you can remove them very easily.
The Sightful Spacetop G1 is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to make AR glasses for work. It’s basically a laptop without a screen connected to a brilliant pair of glasses. The battery life, because of being powered by the base, is leagues ahead of normal AR glasses.
So, impressive work by Ljungblahd, but I don’t see a use for this design aside from perhaps personal preference. Maybe the visor is capable of better depth than glasses? Or perhaps the distinction of AR glasses and VR headsets for its naming means Ljungblahd thinks of it as a proper VR display and not Mixed Reality (MR). If this design ever gets made into a real headset we’ll have our answer.
The Apple Vision Pro is also geared towards productivity but it’s expensive and heavy. For the foreseeable future it’s going to have to be products like the Spacetop G1 for those who want to work in AR. I’m also excited to see what Lenovo is working on after the company announced it was making an XR headset for productivity.
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Abdullah is an ardent believer in the future of VR, and can't wait to see what more it brings to the table as technology improves. He enjoys covering new software releases in the XR industry, as well as major news about hardware and companies focused on VR.
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