Snippet interview with Chief Operating Officer Kevin Henderson:
Good to know. Regarding the wireless module, the Oculus Quest is really popular, it’s selling extremely well, and one of the reasons is that it’s completely wireless. Can you talk about the wireless module that’s coming for Pimax headsets?
When you look at our resolution, which is 4K native per eye with the 8KX, the data transfer rate requirement is real high. That definitely complicates the ability to go wireless. However, we do have a solution for it, there is a solution out there with sufficient bandwidth that we’ve been experimenting with for a while. And at first, we were telling people that we thought that 8KX would not be able to have full resolution across wireless, but I think we will, and it will also handle all of our Pimax headsets.
Do you expect minimal latency?
It is minimal latency. I can’t get into the details of the solution directly, but I’ll just tell you the bandwidth on it is very high. And it’s actually high enough to encompass greater than 4K per eye, so the solution is actually very low latency. I think people will be satisfied with it. The key is to manufacture enough of them where the price becomes reasonable.
Can you disclose the manufacturer or is that still under wraps for now?
I think the supplier or pipeline of that is fully protected. I can just tell you, it’s something that we’ve been working on for a while. We did switch out some of the parts to encompass the bandwidth of the 8KX. But it makes the solution much, much more enduring and in fact, this solution will work on future headsets as well, so it would be the same solution for years to come.
Do you have an idea if it will be available this year?
I would think it would be available this year. But the problem with it is, again, to manufacture enough of them. We have to have a plan for the actual manufacturing where it’s a sufficient volume to hit the price targets that we have. I think we have a good plan to achieve that, working with our partners. Between our newest headsets and the existing ones, there’s a pretty good population of Pimax headsets out there. Anyone that already has a headset can pick up this module, so I do think we have sufficient volume to hit our price target, we’ve run the numbers on that and I think it’s gonna be reasonable.
Is there a possibility to get a higher than 75 Hz refresh rate for the Pimax 8KX in native mode, or is that too much to expect?
No, I wouldn’t say it’s too much to look for, I would just say to look at our history on the refresh rates. With the 5K+, we were originally showing it at 80 Hz. And then it was 85. And then finally, when we released it, it was 90. And then today, you can drive a 5K+ at 120 or even 140 Hz. We have the 5K+ Super, which is 180.
We’ve come a long way with increasing those refresh rates. People even on our very oldest headsets can now do 110 hertz for free. So we’re always experimenting with that. And it’s something that we are interested in adding back if it’s possible. If we do achieve that, we’ll send it out as a firmware update.
And by the way, you should know that if you put the 8KX into scaled mode, you automatically get up to 90 hertz anyway and it’s still 4K per eye, just scaled, so the SDE (screen door effect) is still small. If you’re playing something like VR table tennis where it’s very fast, or anything like an action game or Beat Saber and you want to have a high refresh rate, just launch the headset in the scaled mode, bump it up to 90 Hz, you can do that right now. And of course, as we move along we hope to improve that, just like we have with our previous headsets.
