In February, we shared with your the first real footage of the Lynx-R1 standalone mixed reality headset. Now, the French startup behind it has announced its plan to launch a Kickstarter campaign later this September.
“Our campaign will feature amazing perks like the Lynx Special Edition which has a fully transparent front face,” writes Lynx on its website, where you can sign up with your email address to receive a notification when the campaign launches.
The headset itself won’t be available for purchase until 2022, but it seem that it will be worth the wait. The list of hardware specifications includes the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 5G Platform, 90° FOV with 1600 x 1600 per eye at 90 Hz, hand-tracking, and color passthrough for augmented reality.
On a single charge, you can expect the Lynx-R1 to last around 3 hours, which is in line with the most popular standalone headset currently on the market, the Oculus Quest 2.
Right-out-of-the-box, the Lynx-R1 will support OpenXR, an open, royalty-free standard for access to virtual reality and augmented reality platforms and devices developed by the Khronos Group consortium. As such, there should be no shortage of developer interest.
The headset is priced at $499, so roughly $200 more than the cost of the 128 GB version of the Oculus Quest 2. It’s worth noting that the Lynx-R1 was first supposed to be much more expensive, costing somewhere in the ballpark of $1,500 for the enterprise version.
The new starting price will help make the headset more competitive, and Lynx was able to achieve it by selling apps on its own app store and substituting the base model with B2B sales.
Still the Oculus Quest 2 is a formidable competitor, so it will have to live up to its promises if it wants to become more than a passing news headline.
