Carl Zeiss unveils a $99 virtual reality headset

When the name Carl Zeiss is mentioned, we tend to think about cameras and photography and how Carl Zeiss’ lenses tend to be found on the more high-end of camera equipment. Well it looks like the company is venturing into the wearables market as they have recently announced the Carl Zeiss VR One headset. As you can see in the image, this is a virtual reality headset that seems to be more along the lines of the Samsung Gear VR as opposed to the Oculus Rift. This is because the headset will not come with a display of its own, but will instead use the display of your smartphone to make it work.

While the world awaits a true consumer version of a virtual-reality headset like the Oculus Rift or Sony’s Project Morpheus, the smartphone is emerging as an amuse-bouche for the VR appetite: Demo versions of the Samsung Gear VR already are appearing in Best Buy stores. But at a rumored $200, and another four times that for the Galaxy Note 4 phablet you need to use with it, the Gear VR is a steep investment for people looking for a holdover. To address that gap in the market, several manufacturers are developing cheaper versions of the Gear VR’s “viewfinder” model—stripped of all hardware and relying on your smartphone’s display and accelerometer/gyroscope array to provide a virtual experience. Most, like the Dodocase Smartphone VR Viewer, ape Google’s Cardboard kit, which the company distributed at their I/O conference earlier this year. They’re cheap and they’re clever, but they’re leaving a fairly wide gap in the market. Now, one company has decided to jump into the gap, and it’s a surprising one.