Somnium VR1: In Depth Interview 

extreamly refreshing to see a company just let influencers test stuff

This feels like VR returning to its roots with open development and open communication. More of this in future please.

I very much appreciate Artur being very candid and forthright about the various aspects of the product and development.

In DCS World, you need to salute to trigger a carrier launch. Programming the salute to one of the headset buttons would be cool.

It wasn't until he mentioned the use case at universities etc that this headset even made sense to me. Kudos to them for identifying a hole in the market that they can fill very effectively. It's not for me or the general community, but a very commendable product nevertheless.

Thanks for including question timestamps.

If you think the price is too high, you are delusional. That's what the hardware costs. They don't have the investor money to subsidise your hardware and the development, and you shouldn't want them to. Prusa did it the same way, and their products and software are a bedrock of the 3d printing community. Anyway, this was a surprisingly laid back conversation with zero marketing bullshit. Well done, Brad! And good luck to Somnium.

I'd rather that the company take another year or year and half fix all the comfort issues. The base price is a big problem, the days of the DK2 are gone. The comfort is important because if the HMD becomes tiring an hour in I know I will not use it no matter the price.

5:30 Dammit Brad! I had to get up and excuse myself from the desk for a bit...

I totally understand the pricing, as they need to pay salaries, buy expensive machines and I cannot imagine how can they recover the milions invested otherwise. But considering that other 600€ must be spend on the lighthouse controllers and trackers and you'll have to play with a cable.. well, people must be really passionate to go back from Quest 3 wireless to wire again.... So.. a WiGig module is a must, imo

06:20 oops XD

While I'm personally more excited by larger design leaps, like the bigscreen beyond. I can see the appeal of a no compromises Index upgrade.

great video, huge fan of somnium space and arthur, thank you for sharing

5:33 I can't believe you managed to say that, it was incredibly funny 😂 Props to the CEO for seeming like a cool person and agreeing to such a casual interview, i love it.

the open sourrce aspect is cool, good enterprise potential purely due to that, however all the other stuff and the insane emphasis on crypto is usually a sign of instability, I'd rather follow Lynx if I'm searching for open source headsets

It will be interesting so see what they have to say directly to brad. thanks for the upload.

It's good that they got honest feedback so they can improve their product.

respect

I immensely respect the decision to keep the main production in Europe. Usually I'm willing to pay 30-50% more for a product that was produced in a civilized country instead of under some anti-human fascist regime.

6:24 - Hey Tyriel Here

Thanks for the interview! Rooting for Somnium, its a good idea but Im worried the price will hold back its potential (and will basically mainly target businesses and a very small niche of prosumers), but I understand its not cheap to produce ;)

Did I miss it? What did Arter say about the blurry lines?

This sounds as a nightmare level of difficulty on assembly line

Is there any water in the glass?

I love Somnium's approach to youtubers and the lack of NDA etc. speaks a lot to their confidence, awesome stuff.

That ended kind of awkwardly

Great interview Brad, you're getting much more natural and comfortable doing these now and I like the good natured banter between you two. My first time seeing Artur from Somnium, I admire his transparency and I hope they succeed in both fixing the early criticisms and delivering a solid headset, and finding a place in the market. Seeing how industry giants like Microsoft, and other major companies like HP and HTC have failed to really deliver viable headsets/eco systems over many years it's sobering to realise what a difficult industry this is to create a successful product in so I'll be pulling for Artur and Somnium to deliver.

AHahah. Love this interview's intro and outro.

So heart warming. :)

I'm getting more excited about this

awesome content, keep it up! def interested to see where somnium goes from here.

I can pretty much guarantee that the base price is going to scare off most of the people who were hopeful about this headset, that price is just... insane for a base model

Cool, I sure hope you make this VR headset reasonable.

Nice to know that some companies out there are still sympathetic to their audience. They are the exception nowadays and might not be as competitive on pricing but it's worth the premium to have something with such an agreeable philosophy behind it. Waiting for production reviews, though.

What a hoot

I'd welcome an ipd adjustment lock in that mechanism. I'm always moving the wheel somehow on my headsets.

For me the most important feature of a VR headset is comfort. When we are in VR for hours we need comfort. Brad says it is front heavy and better straps could help (no solve),t why they couldn´t do an smaller form factor with pancake lenses. Something like a Quest3 without battery will be very light and comfortable. Aero and Crystal have exactly same problem. Why VRgineers tend to do bulky headsets? BigScreen proved something smaller can be done. What is preventing Vrgineers to do something more compact?

i would love to see the software

I'm excited. I can admit though, I got a bit worried about the price when he started talking about the headset being used by universities and the military... That level of equipment tends to be above "premium" in price and lean more toward an extortionary price. I hope I'm wrong on that.

I am among the corporate interest use but the size of the VR is a major step back that limits this as a viable solution.

He knew what he was doing posing for the thumbnail like that xD

Audio is really out of sync for anyone else..?

Brad continuing to say Virgineers in an interview with VRgineers is hilarious.

I enjoy your content as well as Cru Cast, the haters and trolls in the comments are just sad beings.

7:50 "we are planning mass production in two and half months" It's been over two and half months, where is somnium now?

Brad, just another great video, thank you! Love the content and integrity 💪. And I couldn't help but laugh to myself when you were asking about what customers could expect at the time of shipping vs. what they say **cough** **cough** Pimax **cough**. So I'm glad you dug into that a bit, because it would be tempting to mentally equivocate Somnium's hardware and delivery expectations to "other companies", but it does seem like they have their sh!t together. I mean, everyone legit expects Varjo to ship and deliver as expected, and likely Apple as well, but you hit that mid-tier enthusiast level with a dose of optimism and copium, and we are all a bit skeptical about what (and if) is going to arrive once the purchase is made. So thanks for that!

Yoooo

After spending already thousands of dollars for a decent computer (4099) and a replica cockpit (f/a-18) i‘m really looking forward to change my reverb G2 for a mixed reality capable headset in 2024. Pass through of Quest 3 is often mentioned to be very bad in poor lighting conditions - at the moment Somnium or XR-4 are the two options to choose from, both seem to have to have pros and cons beside they‘ll be equally expensive I guess: pretty sure the fully loaded VR1 with MR, eye and hand tracking will be around 3k, but lack of controllers, base stations and audio. Taxes are excluded as well so there‘s a lot of extra to pay… what i like about it are the 4 programmable buttons, and so far I really like the approach and the ethics of Artur and the Somnium team. I‘d say the totally needed and highly appreciated comparison for the high end segment would be Somnium VR1 vs. Varjo XR-4. for both headsets I’m on preorder lists and till now I have no clue which to push the trigger for. Hope you’re amazing future content will help with my decision. happy new year!

Woof

TitVR, now you Interesting 🤔

This is the right direction for a niche product like this. Devs crowd surfing with their customer. Opportunities for trust and participation. Hopefully the market is large enough (and pay the ticket price) to catch them.

It seems to me that Somnium is trying to make a similar product to Pimax but fixing the stuff Pimax gets wrong both in terms of jankiness in their product decisions and jankiness in their business practices and support. There are multiple references within this interview that refer to Pimax without necessarily calling them out by name. I've been running Pimax for years. But I would much rather work with another company. My feeling has always been that Pimax is the only company at least targeting the right direction to advance VR for the last 5 years, but the company is frustratingly janky. Stuff like Pimax's weird obsession with powering their headsets off of standard USB power only (not even PD!) which has caused no end of unnecessary problems like running down the battery in the Crystal even when plugged in. These aren't new issues. They had problems with USB powering the 8KX, too. But apparently Pimax didn't learn that this is an unnecessarily problematic approach versus just using wall power. That's just one example of the weird quirks of Pimax. And then there's the quality control issues and awful customer support. I've noticed in the videos with Somnium that Artur brings up these various points specifically here and there as things Somnium wanted to get right. A lot of it is only stuff you would notice if you've been in the Pimax ecosystem for a while and so have suffered those particular pains he refers to. If I can buy a VR headset that does what Pimax does but without Pimax's BS, I am very interested. Price be damned if I can get a product that actually works as advertised out of the box without a hitch.

Yes I understand who this headset is geared towards but it's definitely not me. This is unfortunately to me like the meganex from shiftall, great headset for what it is, but $2000 with taxes. Meganex was at least small and light, this thing is a direct upgrade from an index which is big and heavy, yeah no thank you. I'll be waiting till the Valve Deckard or varjo aero 2. We need to stop taking steps backwards and move towards lighter smaller headsets for the consumer market, while these should be reserved for the business market and pro-enthusiasts. If it was significantly smaller and lighter like the meganex, was wireless and self tracked I'd buy it. The only contender with these specs is the vive xr elite which I tried and it sucked. If big screen released a wireless self tracked eye and mouth tracked headset for $2000 and I'd buy it in seconds. Or if meta since they already made the quest pro, make it significantly smaller and lighter without oled displays and keep qled lcd because burn in will eventually happen especially since the way I use my headset, it will display static images for 4-5 hours at a time per day, for again 2k, I'd buy it in a second.

just bought a quest 3 less than 500 for pcvr is brill, if he’d said 850 i’d be interested

This headset is going to fail. Twice the price of the BigScreen Beyond.

The headset wouldn't sell to consumers for $500... and it needs to be better than high-end VR sim headsets to sell at all...

spend no more than 1k, upgrade every 3 years

58 as the lowest is disappointing for my wife, who has 55 and the only one that does is the beyond, which isnt shareable, so we would need to buy 2 of them, which is a deal breaker. iam sure, the decision to have a higher ranger rather then a lower comes down to more men buying this kind of hardware and men having higher ips ranges, wo which my wife would say: then keep it, iam waiting for a different device

Anyone know where Brad gets his sweet shirts?

Ty Wood in the back! Let him in :(

Tyriel!!

The same people who would buy a Rivian R1T are the ones who will buy this headset.

Hi

That eye tracking algorithm does just not seem great. Binary blink is not great. Too expensive for eye tracking that might not ever be great. Open Source only works if anyone is willing and knowledgeable enough to do anything with it. There's a reason Tobii have little competition not even Sony or vive uses their own solution they use Tobii.

at this price it is impossible for this to be a success, maybe b2b would be a better route until a possible next version at 1000 euros with slim design, eye tracking for fov rendering and MR lets say 3-4 years from now

Two red flags. Crypto involvement and starting price. Also I'm not sure who this product is for. The index is $999 with two base stations. I don't care about resolution, I want motion smoothness and clarity and weight for the 1000000000000000000000 time resolution doesnt matter. Best of luck.

9:32 so this is why the HTC XR Elite hasn’t been reviewed here. Such a shame, the hardware is like 95% awesome software less so but getting there SLOWLY. I heard through the VR grapevine this was a big reason why a lot of creators didn’t talk about it but this is the first direct clue I’ve had from one of them.

Woods in the other room pacing back and forth like he's inside a insane asylum.

I appreciate him not walking around the questions

Ted bennecky 😮😮😮😮

It seems we cant get anything from valve and right now it looks like this might be mily next upgrade! Ill surely watch for this one

for this form factor ( toaster strapped on your head ) i would never pay more than 550 Euros unfortunately ... the 1900 Euros is kinda ridiculous ...this things bring absolutely nothing next to the Quest3 ...

Brad nodding to everything Arthur says.. yet won't even question why it's extremely dead? Their metaverse? It has 2 players peak monthly. Why are you ignoring the only thing this company has created so far Brad?