Headsets for businesses put to the test

A good a fortnight ago, the Swiss virtual, mixed and augmented reality community met at Innospace in Bern for a conference organised by the two companies. Afca and Augment IT organised Meetup. With 60 participants, the event was completely booked out.

The test objects included the Meta Quest Pro and Pico 4 Enterprise headsets, which have been available for a few weeks and were introduced last autumn. The participants were also able to take a closer look at the Vive XR Elite from HTC, which was presented at this year's CES and only went on sale a few days ago. And not yet available, but also already on the test bench, was the Thinkreality VRX from Lenovo. Later in the evening, the AR glasses from the Swiss start-up Almer Technologies also made the rounds, another interesting new product.

The various headsets, all standalone devices that no longer have to be connected to a PC, impressively showed how far technology has come in recent years - not only in the consumer sector, but also in the enterprise sector. According to the manufacturers, there is a wide range of possible applications in companies, ranging from virtual training, engineering and design to remote cooperation and collaboration.

Despite the great and easily recognisable progress, every manufacturer and every device still has room for improvement, whether that is in the field of view and resolution, the passthrough function, hand or eye tracking, battery life or wearing comfort. And even if one specific company was not present with a model, it was omnipresent in the discussions of the AR, MR and VR experts. We are talking about Apple, which is rumoured to present its first mixed reality headset at the WWDC developer conference in June. The community agrees that Apple's entry would definitely give the market a big boost.