There’s lots of exciting virtual reality (VR) news coming out of this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) an one of the most unusual offerings is coming from Alienware. Alienware has already announced a whole host of VR-ready desktops at E3 but its VR backpack concept revealed at the PC Gaming Show is something else altogether.
Designed in conjunction with VR company Zero Latency, who run a multiplayer VR free roam experience, Alienware’s backpack is essentially a VR-ready PC you can wear on your back. The surprisingly compact backpack that Alienware has on display at E3 is simply a very early working concept that doesn’t actually even have a name yet, code or otherwise, but it points towards an exciting future where VR gamers could see themselves freed from the tethers of the desktop, something that free roam experiences like Zero Latency could take excellent advantage of.
Of course, Alienware isn’t the only company working on such a device, with HP, MSI, and Zotac all having announced that they have similar products in development. Considering there are now so many companies working on VR backpacks it’s surely highly likely that one of them is going to get the product just right and we will see PC VR users have access to something small, light, and powerful for a mobile VR experience that doesn’t force users to make performance sacrifices. That is until the point where we’re able to get the necessary power into the lightweight headsets themselves.
As it’s a very early concept version, there’s no price or release date available for Alienware’s VR backpack and we imagine it could be some time before we see a consumer version become available. For more VR news from E3 2016, keep reading VRFocus.
