Qualcomm shows its own VR headset with higher screen resolution than Rift and Vive

Qualcomm has presented its own VR headset, which has an OLED screen of 1440×1440 pixels for each eye. Both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have OLED screens with a resolution of 1200×1080 pixels. The headset runs, of course, on a soc of the American manufacturer itself.

It is unknown where Qualcomm gets the higher resolution OLED screens. There are various manufacturers of OLED screens, of which Samsung is the best known and the South Korean manufacturer is also the market leader in the field of small OLED screens. The manufacturer that will produce the headset, Goertek, uses similar screens as the Rift and the Vive for its own Pico Neo. The OLED screens of the Qualcomm VR820 have a refresh rate of 70Hz, slightly less than the 90Hz of the competition.

The VR820 runs, as the name suggests, on the Snapdragon 820-soc from the American manufacturer, equipped with two Kryo cores at 2.2 GHz and two Kryo cores at 1.6 GHz, assisted by an Adreno 530 GPU. The headset has four microphones for sound recording and support for stereo and surround sound playback. The delay between the user’s movement and the movement on the screen would be limited to 18ms.

The headset uses the Snapdragon VR SDK, which allows developers to write software. The VR820 is a developer headset and the intention is that manufacturers will release similar headsets. The VR820 will be released at the end of this year, the headsets from manufacturers based on this design should follow next year.