Lionus Tech Tips coverage of CES 2015 is brought to you by Phantom Glass. Visit
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there as well as HyperX. So, our first video at the Razer suite
is going to be the things that I'm actually frankly not that interested in.
Number one is the Naboo X. Now, I talked
about the Naboo when they originally announced it back at CES last year. And
the Naboo X is effectively the lowerc cost version of what was already a very
reasonably priced wearable device, albeit one that didn't have a ton of
functionality. So, the main selling points of something like the Naboo were
going to be it's got that sort of like privacy mode, read your messages on a
little OLED screen on the inside thing. It gives you notifications just like
you'd expect any smart wearable that's paired to your phone over Bluetooth
would. It's got some fitness tracking stuff and then they're building in these
social features that I don't know, maybe you guys have a lot more friends than I
do, but I don't know anyone else who wears the same wearable as me. In fact,
I don't have many friends at all. So, for me, it's not much of a selling point. But this one, depending on the
pricing, they're saying it's going to be $49.99 at retail, although insiders
could get them for as little as $19.99. Might be a good balance between, okay,
it doesn't have a lot of functionality, but it's also not very expensive. So,
it's got three LEDs on the top. They are red, green or blue. Although no color
mixing is supported at this time. And then basically you configure it within
their app to say okay well you know green is going to be oh I don't know
missed messages and then red is going to
be whatever else. When you reach an achievement in your fitness goals then
you can get the fireworks to go off. And there's there's little ways that you can
program it like that. It's got a vibration motor. And unlike the Naboo, I
can already say that the build of it seems to be a little bit smarter. So,
it's got more of a watch band style band with lots of different notches. So, I
can actually make it the right size for my wrist, even though mine are quite small. I had a hard time even getting a
watch that was going to fit me quite right. and the overall ruggedness of it.
The module actually fits inside and it looks like they've built in the
capability to potentially upgrade this thing in the future, although Lord only
knows what they would actually do to upgrade it. But the module fits inside and then it's got what is effectively
the band. It makes the band effectively like a protective housing for the thing.
And it really does seem to be designed to be banged around as long as it's uh
within its protective casing. They're quoting 5 to seven days of battery on
it, which for me is really the magic sweet spot. It's the reason that I'm
still using a Pebble instead of an Android Wear device. So, what do I have
to say about this? Um, Razer's going to have to prove to me that social
integration with something like a wearable device, like exchanging, you
know, friend contact information by shaking hands with someone or holding
wrists with them, you know, like, I have the power to exchange contact
information with you or see the last game you played on Steam. They're going to have to prove to me that that's
functionality that people care about. But, in the meantime, at least it's
affordable if nothing else. And they are doing a lot of work on the whole health
side of things as well. As little as I believe that a health wearable is
actually going to make people healthier, they're at least building in support for
things like iOS's health app. So you're not tied down to just using Razer
software on your phone. You can actually do other things as well. Speaking of not
being tied down to Razer software, this is something I wasn't really expecting
to see. Maybe because I don't pay attention to rumors at all. Maybe
because I'm a caveman shut in and I don't read anything at all. But maybe
everyone knew this was coming. But this is their OSVR headmounted display. And
what it is is it's OSVR. You can tell there's no Razer branding on it
whatsoever. Because OSVR is not
Razerowned in the sense that they actually it's
it's not a company that they own. This isn't a product that they own. They are actually they developed this product and
they are open sourcing the whole thing.
So the idea is that they're open sourcing both the software and even this
piece of hardware. You'll be able to download an Excel sheet with every
single component inside this thing. And whether it's for personal use, like you
want to change out the 1080p screen for your own screen if you so desire, or
whether it's for commercial use and other companies want to jumpstart their
own headmounted display technologies, this thing is going to be completely
free for anyone to use and develop for and augment or whatever else the case
may be. Now, you might be asking yourself, well, what's in it for Razer then at this point? Well, they've got a
couple cool technologies that they hope to be contributing to the VR space in
general. Also, one of them is a dual lens system that eliminates distortion.
And also, actually, what's cool is, I believe it's with the knobs on the
bottom, but don't quote me on that one. You can adjust it so that if you have a
visual impairment, if you need glasses, you should be able to use this by
adjusting the dials to sharpen the image without glasses. And the other thing is,
I think they're more than anything else hoping to sell people hydras as VR takes
off and becomes more and more ubiquitous. So, what's in it for Razer?
Well, whether or not they actually release a Razer headmounted display is
up in the air right now, but they will definitely be able to sell peripherals
to anyone who's getting into VR. And anyone who's getting into VR is going to
need a whole new set of peripherals because that whole keyboard mouse thing
does not work very well for VR. So,
whether or not this is a success is uh is a complete mystery to me because
right now I don't think they have any comment pretty much whatsoever from
Oculus about whether they're going to support this whole OSVR thing. And I
would suspect that based on that Oculus right now is talking about game de games
needing to be developed specifically for functionality with the Oculus. We're
going to be looking at kind of an iOS Android type approach here where Oculus
might be that more closed system but more tightly integrated and OSVR might
be that shaky at the start but who knows what the open source community can do to
polish it over the long-term solution. So exciting and uh I definitely need to
actually try it out. But I'll bring you guys another video trying it out on the floor if I get some time. But uh the
future for this one is very very hazy. Both of these. Speaking of things that
are hazy, CES, lots of cigarette smoke in the air, lots of great content. And
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