{"id":148767,"date":"2025-11-19T18:51:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T18:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/148767\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T18:51:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T18:51:07","slug":"finally-vision-pro-level-vr-headsets-may-get-cheaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/148767\/","title":{"rendered":"Finally, Vision Pro-Level VR Headsets May Get Cheaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

While most people interested in VR\/XR don\u2019t want to pay for a Vision Pro<\/a>, they all likely want something that Apple\u2019s $3,500 has: a premium display. Apple\u2019s Vision Pro, like the recently released Samsung Galaxy XR<\/a>, incorporates a micro OLED screen, which is one of the gadget\u2019s biggest selling points. For context, OLED panels have superior contrast, blacks, and better performance when it comes to motion clarity compared to LCD displays in cheaper headsets like Meta\u2019s Quest 3<\/a>. Having used the Vision Pro a bit and the Quest 3 quite a lot, I can say for sure that it makes a big difference.<\/p>\n

The other advantage of OLED is power efficiency. Since each pixel is essentially on or off (black), OLED screens for VR\/XR headsets could also bring longer battery life\u2014an area the Vision Pro and other similar headsets still need to improve on.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one hitch: micro OLED is much more expensive than LCD since it\u2019s difficult to manufacture. The result is a premium headset that costs a hell of a lot more money. But OLED might not be cost-prohibitive for long. TCL just showed off a new OLED panel<\/a> (that\u2019s regular and not the micro OLED in the Vision Pro) made specifically for XR headsets that it says is the highest density OLED-on-glass display yet.<\/p>\n

There are a few things that could make TCL\u2019s new regular OLED panels a big upgrade over LCD, and the biggest of which is the resolution. According to TCL, its newest OLED panel has a resolution of 2,560 x 2,740, which is notably higher than the 2,064 x 2,208 resolution of the Quest 3, though lower than the 3,660 x 3,200 resolution of the micro OLED panel on the Vision Pro.<\/p>\n

\"TCLTCL showed off its new OLED innovation at a conference in China devoted to display technology. \u00a9 TCL <\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the only benefit, though. As noted by UploadVR<\/a>, there are already VR headsets using regular OLED (PSVR 2<\/a>, for example), but in its current iteration, that display tech isn\u2019t suitable for higher-end VR lenses. TCL\u2019s panel, however,\u00a0is\u00a0suited for premium lenses, given its high pixel density of 1,512 PPI. That means anyone using this panel can opt for pancake lenses as opposed to Fresnel lenses, which, in VR-speak, means you\u2019ll get less distortion and sharper images.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the benefit here isn\u2019t just that you\u2019d get a more performant display than LCD (we already have that in micro OLED), but that you\u2019d get VR\/XR headsets with better-than-LCD displays that theoretically would be much cheaper to manufacture and hopefully result in headsets that are a lot more affordable. That could open the door to a whole new world of midrange headsets that look and feel a lot more premium than the Quest 3, but cost a lot less than the Vision Pro. We all love a middle ground, don\u2019t we?<\/p>\n

Whether the OLED panel actually finds its way to headsets remains to be seen. There are still some unanswered questions, like how bright TCL\u2019s new displays are (though we do know it has a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 120Hz refresh rate, and 110% wide color gamut) or how much they\u2019d cost to manufacture at scale, but on the surface, it seems like a step in the right direction. Because, as nice as Apple\u2019s Vision Pro is, I think it\u2019s clear not many people are willing to spend several thousand dollars on a \u201cspatial computer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While most people interested in VR\/XR don\u2019t want to pay for a Vision Pro, they all likely want…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[2724,61,60,80,210,211,212,2655],"class_list":{"0":"post-148767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-apple-vision-pro","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-virtualreality","14":"tag-vr","15":"tag-xr"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}