14 DAY TRIAL // Virtual reality is something into which more and more tech giants seem to be willing to venture. After Oculus Rift, Samsung has made a debut into the market as well.
The most recent addition to the VR family is Carl Zeiss, which unveiled the budget $99 / €78 headset a few days ago.
However, all these offerings are topped by Google’s “out of the box” Cardboard headset, which is DIY free app experiment that everybody can try out.
Anyway, it appears that not only giants in the industry are looking the way of Virtual Reality.
Expect a VR headset from Archos next month
According to a report from ArcTablet, it seems like Archos will be jumping in the VR bandwagon soon enough, which translates into either next month or December.
Knowing Archos is a low-cost device manufacturer, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the headset will be cheap. How cheap, you might be wondering? Well, it appears that you'll be able to grab your own, personal VR headset for a lousy 38 bucks.
VR headsets didn’t even go mainstream yet and their prices are already descending at an accelerated rate. That’s pretty strange, to say the least.
The VR machine was demoed in France
Anyway, according to the report, Archos has already demoed the headset in their home country, France.
The model (which doesn't have a name, so we don’t know under which moniker it will be marketed) is said to be made of ABS plastic and to work with any smartphone you have laying around the house (Archos used its own 50b Platinum to demonstrate how things go about).
The company says the VR set should be compatible with smartphones with displays varying between 4-inch and 6-inch, although larger 7-inch screens might work as well. So if you have a small tablet, you might be able to work with that, too.
The headset is said to make use of a stereoscopic 3D viewer and to be quite light weight, when it doesn't have the smartphone attached to it, that is (handset turns out to be the heaviest component).
The report only provides us with a single, blurry picture of the headset, so we can’t really tell much about its physical appearance except that it’s black and that it seems to be quite large.
According to those who managed to test it, the Archos VR headset is capable of delivering a fun experience, even if the user experience isn't all that comfortable.
However, Archos still has time to perform some tweaks until the gizmo makes a debut into the wild. Got 35 bucks to spare, anyone?