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The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

Keep your finger on the pulse of the XR industry with the Daily Roundup, the most important news in one daily email.

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

Zero Latency, one of the longest running VR attractions in the out-of-home VR space, is dropping the backpack PCs that were once the backbone of the platform. Now the company says it’s moving to standalone Vive Focus 3 headsets with wireless delivery of PC-rendered VR content.

Unlike a VR arcade, which lets customers play consumer VR content, Zero Latency is a VR attraction offering totally unique multi-user VR experiences designed to be played in a large, shared arena.

The company, which offers up its platform and experiences to franchisees, has steadily upgraded its VR tech as the space has developed.

Early on the system relied on a custom backpack PC paired with OSVR HDK 2 headsets and an optical overhead tracking system. Eventually the company moved to purpose-built VR backpacks and first-gen WMR headsets from HP, which allowed it to streamline the system considerably by dropping the overhead tracking in favor of WMR’s inside-out tracking. Later versions of the system moved to the more modern HP Reverb headset.

Now Zero Latency has announced its latest upgrade to the system, which further streamlines the setup by opting for the standalone Vive Focus 3 and streaming PC-rendered content wirelessly to the headsets. The company says it’s streaming over a local Wi-Fi 6E network which purportedly offers lower latency than prior Wi-Fi revisions.

That means dropping the VR backpacks entirely, which not only reduces the cost of the system, but significantly reduces complexity for both operators and users; operators don’t need to clean, charge, and maintain the backpack units, and it’s one less step during onboarding which means more playtime for users.

And while other standalone headsets like Quest 2 might have been an option, HTC’s Vive Focus 3 has a couple of unique advantages for out-of-home use. Especially its swappable battery which reduces the number of headsets needed on hand as the batteries can be charged independently and swapped on the fly.

On the content side, Zero Latency locations continue to offer the same experiences as before, which span cooperative and competitive multiplayer experiences with up to eight simultaneous players. Though, given the company’s knack for innovation in their in-house content, it’ll be interesting to see if the move to a more simplified system will unlock potential for experiences that wouldn’t quite work with the bulkier setup.

Given today’s announcement, it’ll likely be some time yet before the upgrade rolls out to existing Zero Latency locations, but it seems the company will be offering this upgraded version of the system to new franchisees going forward.

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Beyond funny that they pride themselves (and even name themselves) “Zero Latency”, yet pull this move.

Well backpack PC still communicates with the server wirelessly though, and after playing with AirLink I think the latency really is negligible, I can’t tell it’s wireless really, and Vive’s 6G wigig wifi should be even better.

we’re talking “motion to photon” latency when the headset is hardwired vs wireless. That’s not the same as connecting to a server for multiplayer. I think you probably knew that though.

Having used backpack PCVR at many different locations, the inherent latency for wi-fi streaming headsets may require rebranding from “Zero latency”…

Wireless VR latency with a good setup is sub-30ms…not zero but than neither is a wired VR. I bet most couldn’t tell the difference aside from lack of the awkward backpack.

Do you think latency will be a problem? Ask those who play expert+ on Beat saber wireless from SteamVR if its a problem :P

That much more than the inherent latency of backpack PCs communicating with the server over wifi?

Especially its swappable battery which reduces the number of headsets needed on hand as the batteries can be charged independently and swapped on the fly.

Yup, hot swappable batteries are awesome. That’s why I really like my Quest2 BoboVR M1 Pro strap

In an age were Quest 2 exist this seems ridiculous