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Canon Showed Its Own VR Set at Canon Expo 2015

Canon comes horribly late at the VR party

Sep 15, 2015 15:56 GMT  ·  By
Canon's handheld VR set is as weird and clunky as it is technologically superb
   Canon's handheld VR set is as weird and clunky as it is technologically superb

At the moment, there are mainly three contenders in the virtual reality race, Valve, Sony and Oculus, with Microsoft being the awkward, but impressive nevertheless, duck.

Out of nowhere now comes Canon, with its own, even more awkward VR set, bent on providing the best in image fidelity, beating any other contender in the VR race. And hearing this from a company known for its excellent optics isn't something to be taken lightly.

Shown as a "secret" prototype at Canon Expo 2015 in New York, the Canon VR device looks like some retro-futuristic handheld pair of glasses, allowing you to enjoy the virtual reality just like some 19th century gentleman would enjoy a painting on a wall by looking through his elegant handheld glasses. However, putting aside the extremely awkward design, the handheld device is actually quite impressive.

Horrible design, excellent graphical fidelity

When the user holds the set to their face, they will be able to look around in a 360 sphere, while the screen displaying images for them will total a 2.5K resolution, with 120-degree field of vision. This means that it has two 2560x1440 resolution screens, which is almost double what current Oculus and HTC screens have to offer.

Popular Science managed to get a glimpse of the new device and says that the footage shown on the two 5.5" displays has been recorded at an astronomical 56000x28000 resolution.

Fortunately, the design is preliminary and it appears that the final product will be truly head-mounted, which will be a most fortunate decision indeed. Apparently, Canon intends this device to be used for education, military and personal entertainment.

Not much else is known, unfortunately, about the new VR attempt from Canon, but even though ergonomically it might seem disastrous at the moment, the image quality seems out of this world. In a perfect world, we would probably have Oculus' or HTC's ergonomic design combined with Canon's excellent visual fidelity, but we don't live in a perfect world yet, do we?