Tired of Waiting for Apple's Vision Pro? Varjo XR-4 Is Ready to Get to Work Now

Apple had made a lot of headlines recently with its upcoming Vision Pro headset, but for businesses interested in VR right now, Varjo today launched its next-generation headsets, the XR-4, XR-4 Focal Edition, and XR-4 Secure Edition.

Building off the XR-3 headset we saw at CES in January, the new headsets use high-resolution displays, foveated capture streams, advanced LiDAR depth sensing, and camera sensors to "mimic the function of the human eye," Varjo says. They come with controllers powered by Razer.

“We’re not trying to have you watch movies on headsets or play games. It’s really about replicating reality at the highest fidelity so you can do your work—things you might have done normally in the real world—you can do in mixed reality,” Varjo Chief Product Officer Patrick Wyatt tells PCMag.

Unlike consumer headsets, which are mainly used for gaming, Varjo’s headsets are designed with industrial use in mind. Currently, 25% of Fortune 100 companies are using the company’s headsets to do things like train pilots and astronauts, shorten the timeline for making a car, or render 3D visualizations for architects and designers.

Varjo says the XR-4 lineup offers a 50% wider field of view over the previous generation and double the display brightness at 200 nits. They're powered by Nvidia RTX Ada Generation GPUs and integrated into Nvidia's Omniverse platform.

XR-4 Series Specs

• 4K per eye (3,840 by 3,744 resolution)

• Two 3.59-inch mini-LED panels

• 90Hz refresh rate

• 1:10,000 contrast with local dimming

• 200 nits of brightness

• Color gamut: 98% sRBG, 96% DCI-P3

• 120-by-105-degree field of view

• 51 pixels per degree (ppd)

• Two 20-megapixel passthrough cameras

• 22-millisecond latency

• 1 DisplayPort and 1 USB-C port

• Spatial audio on the integrated speakers+ 3.5mm jack for audio-out

• Two noise-cancelling, integrated microphones

The XR-4 Focal Edition takes things a step further with gaze-directed autofocus cameras and enhanced camera resolution for things like pilot training, and the XR-4 Secure Edition adds enterprise-level security for government users.

One Varjo client is electric vehicle manufacturer Rivan. "At Rivian, design time is of the essence. Together with VRED [3D visualization software from Autodesk], Varjo has taken a lot of time and money out of the process and lets us iterate and integrate more quickly than ever before,” Trevor Greene, Rivian's Lead of Surface Design and Visualization, said in a statement.

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Rivian tested an early version of XR-4, which lets it "make changes and apply a whole range of new materials and know exactly what the final product will be like," Greene said.

The XR-4 series starts at $3,990. The new headsets are available for enterprise orders immediately, with first shipments starting in December. That's pricier than the $3,499 Vision Pro but half the price of the Varjo XR-3.