Vuzix VR920 Review
The iWear VR920.
In the amazing year 2008, we take video game technology for granted.
Nobody who played the original Pac-Man in the arcades during the 1980s really fathomed where video games would go by 2007. We might have suspected the direction technology would take us, but if you could travel back in time to 1983 and put a contemporary game like Crysis in front of an Atari 2600 junkie, I don't know if they could handle it. A game so visually advanced, where the player controls the character from a first-person perspective instead of a small, pixilated avatar would be on the verge of unfathomable for them.
The last 20 years have showed us just how fast video game technology can move, and it's not hard to see that consciously or unconsciously it's been moving in a very clear direction: complete immersion of the player's senses. Perhaps in another 40+ years the goal will be achieved with something like the holodeck on Star Trek through a direct brain-to-computer interface like we saw in the "Matrix" films-but the goal remains the same: "virtual reality," the old catchphrase.
While there has been some impressive virtual reality hardware available in the past, it has usually been terribly expensive for the individual consumer or it's been extremely limited in scope. A full virtual reality helmet with a head-mounted display and head tracking can easily cost many times the average person's annual salary and is too large and unwieldy to be convenient. On the other hand, some products with a limited scope have had modest commercial success, such as the TrackIR, which tracks the user's head movement, or 3D glasses you can buy for your PC that add realistic depth to the games you play.
So when Vuzix announced its VR920 video eyewear that it says is capable of 3D display and head tracking with a built-in microphone and headphones - all included in a very conveniently small package for the consumer-friendly price of $399 - we took some serious notice.
The Vuzix VR920 Video Eyewear
Put simply, the VR920 is a head-mounted display with a lot of impressive features that have typically been associated with virtual reality headsets. The VR920 is especially notable because, while its feature list is long and thorough, the unit is small and light. There have been other VR headsets that have offered the features that the VR 920 does, but they are typically large, unwieldy and expensive.
The VR920 is small compared to other VR headsets.
The VR920 comes in a relatively small box. The sample package we received contained little other than the VR920 itself in a slick little protective carrying bag; other than the VGA-to-DVI adapter, that's about it. It doesn't come with an AC adapter because it doesn't require one; the VR920 runs off of the power of its USB cable.
The iWear VR920, cables and DVI-to-VGA adapter.
Installation
Compared to the other products to which you might compare the VR920, setting up the driver and calibrating the unit is a snap. Since power is provided through the USB plug, there is no separate AC adapter to muck around with. As far as the hardware goes, you just need to plug the USB cable into your computer and the video cable into your video card. The only possible complication occurs if your video card's output is DVI instead of VGA, and Vuzix includes a VGA-to-DVI adapter in that case. The process is as quick and simple as it gets.
The second installation process involves the software and drivers, of course. The newest drivers can be found at www.vr920.com. A single file that you download installs the VR920's driver, calibrator and iWearMonitor.
The Calibrator is an application that is used to set up the VR920's head tracking capability. To calibrate, you must simply rotate the VR920 through its three-axes of motion and then press a button to let the app know the attitude of the VR920 when it's looking straight front.
The VR920 head tracking calibrator application.
The iWearMonitor software is another component that monitors what games you are running and enables the head tracking driver as needed. The iWearMonitor currently only supports a handful of titles, although the ones supported are popular: World of Warcraft, Second Life, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake 4, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Lock On and IL2 Sturmovik.
The VR920 iWearMonitor application.
Setting up the iWearMonitor for some specific titles is the only part of using the VR920 that can be tricky. Some games, like Half Life 2 Deathmatch, require the user to manually copy some files to specific folders in a game's subdirectory; the iWearMonitor doesn't do the file copying, but provides the user with instructions. In other games, the iWearMonitor will attempt to copy the files itself, but might fail. For Lock On, the iWearMonitor kept giving an error message, and I had to diagnose the problem myself-it turned out that Lock On had set some of its folders as read-only by default. Finally, some games just worked, like Microsoft Flight simulator X. This inconsistency is definitely something that could use a bit more polish, and in contrast with the simplicity of setting up the rest of the VR920, the iWearMonitor could use some work.
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