If you have any remote interest in VR and its progress, you might have heard of “Bigscreen Beyond”, an upcoming VR Headset touted as the world’s smallest headset. Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar announced the preorders for that product yesterday, and the announce, along with a bunch of promotional reviews published by multiple tech outlets and Youtubers, made quite a splash in the tech world.

Although the Bigscreen Beyond VR headset does look quite impressive, I have a few reservations to make personally…

Update: in an earlier version of the article we said the displays where 5120×2560 each. They’re actually 2560×2560 each, for a total resolution of 5120×2560. Thanks to the folks who have let me know about the typo!

What is Bigscreen Beyond

Bigscreen are mostly known for their VR software, in particular the VR social platform of the same name (available on Steam), which allows you to “use your PC desktop in VR, watch movies with friends in a virtual movie theater, […] and hangout in social VR chat rooms.”. The app has fairly positive feedback on Steam and seems pretty good.

Leveraging their knowledge of the many Virtual Headset they develop with, the company has decided to launch their own headset, the Bigscreen Beyond. Its most impressive feature, which has contributed to the shock factor when it was announced yesterday, is how small and lightweight the device is.

It isn’t only the promotional video either (we know how these trailers can be good at hiding a lot of the cables to make a product look better than it really is): tests by youtubers show that the actual device really is that small and lightweight.

As someone who’s always been annoyed at the size of existing VR offers, this certainly does look attractive. Of course the device still has at least one cable required to connect to the video output of your PC, but that’s probably a given for any given VR headset nowadays.

Bigscreen Beyond – compromises were made, but still great on paper

Bigscreen Beyond isn’t bringing any magic technology to the table, instead, to achieve this form factor, they’re making a series of compromises, which may or may not work for you.

The most obvious one is that each headset is tweaked at order time to exactly match your face (you need to use iPhone’s 3D face scanning and send that to Bigscreen for them to mold the headset exactly to match your face and your eyesight). This means the headset will only really work for you (although I’m sure at some point they will sell a service to order more molds if needed). Furthermore, the headset has no camera and will rely on existing tracking technology (SteamVR Base station). It also ships without controllers, you’ll need to use Steam compatible ones. All of this will add to the price point of the device, but might work for you if you already had a VR gear and were thinking of upgrading the headset.

In terms of resolution and field of view, the Bigscreen Beyond seems very reasonable, with 5K (5,120 x 2,560, in other words 2 times 2,560 x 2,560) 90Hz OLED displays and a 93 degrees horizontal field of view. By comparison, the PSVR2 is 2000 x 2040 per eye, but a 110 degree field of view, which might feel more immersive? At the end of the day immersion depends on both FoV and resolution, so one or the other might work better for you.

It’s of course worth mentioning that when all is said and done, and with the controllers/base requirements, the Bigscreen Beyond ends up being more than twice the cost of PSVR2, so that has to be taken into account for a fair comparison.

Can Bigscreen Beyond succeed?

Even with all of these caveats, and at a price point of $999, one might still decide that the Bigscreen beyond is for them.

But here is my main concern, at a personal level: this is Bigscreen’s very first entry in hardware. I know for a fact that software companies getting into hardware can have a very, very hard time in particular with their first launch. In my experience, such a first product goes one of two ways: either it’s a disaster (technically, or from a sales perspective, or whatever) at which point the company stops supporting it quickly and gives up on hardware, or it’s a success, at which point a version 2 will come up with better support. V1 users will be left in the cold less than a year after their purchase.

That is of course just my personal opinion. We’ll have to wait and see if the Bigscreen beyond can become a serious competitor in the VR space, or if will quickly be forgotten.

Details and preorders for the Bigscreen Beyond can be found at https://www.bigscreenvr.com/