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Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

There is a company called Simula that makes a headset specifically for work. I know about them because Meta subpoena'd them a month ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x293SiEdv4M

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Simula looks like it’s pre-order only, do you know if they have actually shipped units? I couldn’t tel if the preorder is for their first device or an iteration, it looked like their first serious foray.

Additionally, it would be great if one could try the software with already owned VR headsets, without having to buy their hardware before.

Their software is open source : https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

However it looks like they are more focused on hardware than software right now

Yep, you can try out our software at https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula on the HTC Vive and Valve Index platforms.

If you don't have one of those headsets, there are some videos of people (whom we have no affiliation with) on YouTube testing it out: https://youtu.be/8gVLF8SnK84?t=424 Here's also (a pretty old) video of me hacking on Simula, in Simula: https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI.

It's also true that we're more focused on hardware right now. We plan on reverting more towards software development in 2023. For more details: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/180#issuecomment-1...

Some things we have planned to implement include VR window tiling and some other UI stuff.

Does Simula have pass through? I can information about it on your website.

Good luck with the project!

> Simula looks like it’s pre-order only, do you know if they have actually shipped units?

Not yet, you can follow their progress at their blog (https://simulavr.com/blog/).

Its still in development, nothing shipped yet!

Meta lifted its ban on this, they will be able to ship! Also, has mucch better pixel density than quest headsets, even quest pro. Will be a bliss to read on. But provably no propper head tracking

> But provably no propper head tracking

They are supposed to include 6DOF positional tracking. Do you mean it's not "proper" because it's inside-out tracking?

Positional tracking required high performance, extremely high fidelity CV / ML algorithms. The guardian on Oculus being as any ML algos 'just' 9X% accurate makes me rage regularly, a tiny kickstarter being able to deliver smth better is highly unlikely imo

We're still in preorder phase, aiming to ship most headsets in ~Q2 of 2023.

This is our first foray into hardware, but we already developed a stable Linux VR Desktop (https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula) from 2017-2021.

We try to provide frequent updates on our hardware engineering progress. For example, here's a recent post showing some videos of our review units: https://simulavr.com/blog/first-glimpse-of-review-units/ If you're interested in community discussion, you might also check out https://hn.algolia.com/?q=simulavr.com.

The headset doesn't look very ergonomic.

Might still be worked on at the phase they're at. I do wonder about the lack of an overhead strap in the design.

In the pictures and video, the headset the guy is wearing is probably light and without a display to vertically align his sight on.

I imagine they're trying to avoid the strap to make it more stylish to enable its use in public settings, but if it ends up being uncomfortable or hard to focus through, that would really hurt all other values it offers. It's meant primarily for work, so one should be able to stay on it for hours. Wonder how things will turn out.

Worst-case though, adding a strap is probably not too difficult of a mod.

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