What are the top questions as you consider the utilization of head mounted display (HMD) visualization devices for your engineering, design, scientific 3D visualization, education or training environment? HMD 3D visualization devices can enhance human–computer interaction and performance of your teams. 

For enterprise level corporate organizations, HMD selection and integration can cover numerous technical aspects, but most frequently the priority involves resolution, refresh rate, field of view (FOV) and human factors. In our experience, customers rank resolution (UHD, 4K, 5K, and etc.) the highest, followed by refresh rate (faster speeds eliminate lagging, glitching, jagged, and staggered movement), and then Field Of View (FOV). Once the display gets to a certain quality with a high refresh rate, the focus may turn to FOV.  Human ergonomic is also an issue and these factors can greatly affect useability and quality of workflow.

Questions

How will your HMD's be used?  Will teams be collaborating, and more specifically will members of the team need to collaborate outside of the HMD?  For team collaboration, the typical setup involves the immersed user perspective simultaneously displayed on a large projected screen, monitor or video wall so the rest of the team can collaborate on the data being viewed and evaluated. 

Who is using the HMD? This can affect the type of HMD you choose as well.  The hardware specification for users in design/engineering will differ from the specs for users in marketing.

What content will be driven to the HMD?  The large and more complex the content (think 80 million polygon rendered models) will greatly affect performance and drive what technical specifications will be needed. No designer or engineer will want to have a glitchy movement as they are attempting a review.

How will the motion tracking be set up?  Lots of environments want a wireless setup, until they realize their models will not run effectively that way and the "tether" that supplies the data/visual content to the HMD is the only way to get ALL of the data transferred via the bigger and faster bandwidth of the wired method. Most enterprise environments use tethers (the umbilical cable that provides data to the HMD), versus wireless for the simple fact that performance is better (speed, smoothness of movement) and without glitches. 

Do you need to work with your IT department?  It may take time to get authorization, hardware "tagged", and register MAC addresses to get them on the network. Does the HMD of choice require access to the Internet to validate? In some cases, software can get blocked by the firewall, so the devices need to be whitelisted - any software (including the gaming application SteamVR) likely requires the corporate IT team to provide access to prevent blocking. This can cause problems with updates as well. Some manufacturers are classified as gaming companies which can create another security hurdle to jump.  Some enterprise environments maintain a DEV (development) network which allows them to have connectivity without IT coordination. There may be pros/cons to this option.  If you have a DEV environment, you will want to know if you can your models into the DEV environment safely/securely and does the DEV environment have access to the Internet for any HMD hardware validation/subscription updates.

Research

Technology keeps improving resolution, refresh rate, and FOV for HMD's. More so on the resolution and refresh rate front. There seems to be a smaller market for HMD's with extra-wide field of view. This could be due to the fact that the wider the FOV, the larger the HMD on your head which can be difficult to enjoy ergonomically.  Research is being conducted, and the FOV's are improving as technology improves, but other technical aspects of HMD's have made more advances to date. Some HMD research and development of wider FOV include: StarVR with 210° FOV that uses cants their displays to achieve this, Rakkolain with a 318° FOV (which exceeds the human field-of-view so part of the HMD would not be useful) using curved screens, Samsung (patent filed) with 180° FOV using curved OLED displays and two wide-angle lenses, VRgineers XTSL/VRHero with a 180° FOV using OLED displays, one for each eye, Pimax with a 200° diagonal FOV using two screens, and Hashemian with a 180° FOV HMD that uses LED's to approximate peripheral vision. Some of these are not currently available commercially (yet).

There are many HMD's commercially available, and more on the way.  Here is just a short list to compare:

Budget

Finally, budget may have some impact on what HMD you choose. We are talking about enterprise level users here (even though some of the devices are geared toward the video gaming community) and enterprise budgets can typically afford what is needed to enhance their organization's capabilities. Consumer HMD's starting costs can be lower, but with lower performance and scalability, and more challenges to get into an enterprise environment. Professional AV hardware can run into the 4 and 5 figures (thousands and tens of thousands) of dollars, but typically you get what you pay for. Beyond the hardware costs you need to consider what operating expenses there are including support, updates, and subscriptions which can run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars on the Pro AV side. 

About IGI

Immersion Graphics, Inc. (IGI) provides audio visual design, engineering, consulting, product sales, control system programming, custom fabrication, installation, preventative maintenance, and extended support services out of its headquarters location in Detroit and west coast operation in Los Angeles. Additional offices are located in Indianapolis, and Grand Rapids.

Founded in 1998, IGI has installed numerous large-scale, ultra-high resolution systems throughout the U.S. in the automotive, higher education, medical, financial, and energy transmission markets, and for the United States military and other government agencies. Applications include industrial design, engineering and data visualization, mission-critical command & control room environments, presentation systems, video conferencing, digital signage, and a variety of commercial AV solutions for emerging markets where the simultaneous visualization of 3D models and complex data by a group is essential to effective decision making. To get an in depth look at what we do, see our website at www.werigi.com, we are IGI.

IGI is minority owned, veteran owned, and a small business and SBA 8(a) program graduate.