Starbreeze Aims To Outdo Oculus Rift On “Immersive” Gaming Experiences With Its Own VR Headset

If you’re familiar with Starbreeze, it’ll be through its games such as The Darkness and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, or perhaps you know the company as the owner of Payday developer Overkill. You won’t be familiar with the Swedish company for creating hardware. But soon you might be.

Back along, Starbreeze acquired French VR company InfinitEye and in a pre-E3 teaser video the company revealed that this purchase has enabled it to develop its own VR headset called Project StarVR.

Primarily being a game development company (as opposed to hardware developers such as Oculus VR and Sony), Starbreeze is focusing on delivering an “immersive” gaming experience with two 5.5 inch Quad HD panels that supply a 5120×1440 resolution.

With this, Project StarVR gives you a 210 degrees field of view from inside the headset. Compare that to the Oculus Rift’s 100 degrees field of view and you might see the appeal. It means that Project StarVR gives you full vision in a virtual world as you’d normally experience in real life. This means that, let’s say you’re playing a first-person game, it’s possible for the developer to put movement in your peripheral vision. That could be put to particularly good use in a horror game, for example, as seeing monsters in the corner of your eye that disappear when you turn your head could be very spooky.

Starbreeze seems to have realized the potential of horror gaming with its headset as it announced that it will be showcasing Overkill’s The Walking Dead adaptation with Project StarVR. It will be running on Starbreeze’s newly acquired Valhalla Engine which it is hoped will render the game as almost “indistinguishable from reality” once you’re inside.