Varjo Aero, the company’s first and only consumer-focused headset, is no longer being sold.
Aero was a tethered PC VR headset that launched in 2021 with the highest angular resolution on the consumer market, a position it solely held until Pimax Crystal last year tied with it. All Varjo’s previous headsets were for businesses only – Aero was a new direction in also offering a product targeted at consumers.
Photos taken by UploadVR for our review.
The headset was priced at $1990 for most of its time on the market, until it was cut in half to $990 in September. It’s clear now that was a clearance sale.
Aero featured 2880×2720 per eye LCD displays, aspheric lenses, and eye tracking enabling automatic IPD adjustment and foveated rendering in supported software.
Like many other PC headsets such as Bigscreen Beyond, Varjo Aero required SteamVR Tracking base stations which aren’t included, and nor are any controllers. That means the total buy-in cost if you didn’t already own these accessories was $2600, while after the price cut it was $1600.
Jamie Feltham
In our review of Varjo Aero we praised the headset’s stunning visual clarity, precise eye tracking, and the comfort delivered by its hybrid halo strap design.
However, we criticized the distracting warping distortion and the unnatural shape of the field of view (which has a rigid horizontal cutoff at the bottom), as well as the lack of a built-in microphone.
Likely due to its high price, Varjo Aero failed to gain enough adoption to even be listed in the Steam Hardware Survey’s VR section, and thus remains part of the ‘Other’ section, which made up 1.19% of SteamVR users in December.
David Heaney
Varjo recently launched its new XR-4 headset series, starting at $3990 and promising PC-based mixed reality “practically indistinguishable from natural sight”. While XR-4 is currently only sold to enterprise and governments, Varjo says it plans to let individuals buy it too at some point in the future.
