The trouble with most Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmenter Reality (AR) kits in the market is that they need to be tethered to another device to power them. The Oculus Rift, for example, needs a high-end video card, at least an i5 processor, 8+ GB RAM and more. Since it's all going to be connected to your PC via USB cables, the AR portion of things is basically non-existent.
HTC Vive, which offers an AR experience and wireless motion tracking, also requirs the headset to be hooked to a computer. Samsung Fear VR's computing is done by the Samsung Galaxy smartphone that needs to be inserted and offers only a fraction of the functionality of a proper VR headset, which brings us to the Sulon Q.
Having partnered with AMD, Sulon's Q is, according to them, "the world's first and only all-in-one, tether-free, "wear-and-play" headset for VR, AR and spatial computing."
What this means is that Sulon has managed to cram all the computing needed to power the whole VR/AR experience into the headset, giving you free reign to walk the streets, blasting nasty aliens (at the risk of random people on the streets giving you weird looks), without banging into a lamp post.
Apart from the processors and display units and more, Sulon has also included their Spacial Processing Unit, which according to Dhan Balachand, CEO of Sulon Technologies Inc., offers real-time environment mapping and tracking from the inside outward. He also says that the system enables dynamic virtualisation for VR/AR fusion, and gesture recognition.
The system runs Windows 10 and also allows users to project virtual screens on walls and other surfaces and interact with them through gestures and the bundled wireless keyboard and mouse.
Coming to AMD's role in the device, at the heart of the Sulon Q is the recently launched AMD FX-8800P processor with Radeon R7 Graphics. It features four compute cores and eight GPU cores that share memory through AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) rendering high-quality visuals on a 2560x1440-pixel OLED display.
With an expected launch in late spring, the Sulon Q is really something to look forward to and is definitely the direction in which VR and AR technology needs to be going.
