Technology

We build the hard parts ourselves

A headset is not a screen in a plastic shell. It is an optical system, a tracking system, a thermal system and a compute system that all have to agree. ORBITAL owns the optical design, the tracking firmware, the haptic driver and the runtime — which is why our devices stay consistent from the first prototype to the ten-thousandth unit.

Six pillars

The engineering, pillar by pillar

Each pillar has its own bench, its own test rig and its own release criteria. Nothing ships because it looks fine in a demo.

Optics & display

Folded pancake optics shorten the optical path to a few centimetres, so the mass sits close to your face instead of hanging off it.

  • Dual micro-OLED panels, 3840 × 3552 per eye
  • Per-eye distortion and chromatic-aberration mapping
  • Low-persistence drive to remove smear during head turns
  • 1,100 nits peak for readable text against bright virtual surfaces

Spatial tracking

Six cameras and a 200 Hz inertial fusion stage run entirely on-device. No base stations, no calibration ritual, no cable to a PC.

  • 200 Hz inside-out SLAM with relocalisation under 300 ms
  • 26-joint hand skeleton tracked without controllers
  • 120 Hz eye tracking feeding foveated rendering
  • dToF depth on Vision X1 Pro for metric room capture

Haptic interaction

Haptics are a rendering problem, not an accessory. Glide drives wideband voice coils with the same frame budget as the visuals.

  • 20 Hz – 1,000 Hz reproduction across three octaves
  • 6 ms from render to actuator
  • Per-finger amplitude and frequency envelopes
  • Haptic authoring API in the Unity and Unreal packages

Compute & streaming

Whether the pixels come from the headset or from a workstation, the goal is the same: keep motion-to-photon latency under the threshold where your inner ear stops arguing.

  • On-device XR silicon with 16 GB unified memory
  • Wi-Fi 7 wireless PC VR streaming under 20 ms motion-to-photon
  • Wired DisplayPort alt-mode for uncompressed tethered sessions
  • Nexus C1 hub streaming four headsets from one machine

Structure & materials

Weight is a specification. So is where that weight sits, how hot the front plate gets after two hours, and how the facial interface behaves after a hundred wipe-downs.

  • Magnesium alloy frame with glass-filled polymer shells
  • 428 g balanced front to back, 62 mm centre of mass offset
  • Graphite spreader plus a quiet 40 mm blower
  • Three facial interface sizes, replaceable and cleanable

Software platform

One runtime across the whole line-up. Content written for the Vision X1 runs on the X1 Pro and streams to Aero without a rebuild.

  • OpenXR 1.1 conformant runtime
  • Unity and Unreal plugins with sample scenes
  • Fleet console for kiosk mode, content push and telemetry
  • On-device processing for eye and hand data by default
Process

From optical simulation to shipping carton

Six stages, each with a gate that a project has to pass before it consumes the next round of tooling money.

Stage 01

Optical design & simulation

Ray tracing, ghost-image analysis and stray-light simulation decide the optical stack before any metal is cut.

Stage 02

Mechanical & thermal prototyping

CNC and SLA prototypes verify the weight distribution, thermal path and comfort over multi-hour wear.

Stage 03

Firmware & calibration

Tracking calibration, per-unit optical correction and latency budgets are locked against the bench rigs.

Stage 04

Reliability & compliance

Drop, tumble, thermal shock, humidity and photobiological safety testing against IEC 62471 and regional EMC rules.

Stage 05

Pilot production

A limited pilot run proves the assembly fixtures, the calibration station and the end-of-line test software.

Stage 06

Mass production & QA

Every unit is optically measured and tracking-calibrated, with the test record tied to its serial number.

Platform

Build once, deploy on every ORBITAL device

Our runtime is OpenXR 1.1 conformant and our SDKs are thin wrappers around it. Extensions for eye tracking, depth and haptics are exposed as optional features, so an application never breaks because it ran on a device with fewer sensors.

  • OpenXR 1.1 runtime with vendor extensions documented publicly
  • Unity and Unreal plugins, sample scenes and a latency profiler
  • Fleet console: content push, kiosk mode, device telemetry, remote wipe
  • Privacy-first defaults — eye and hand data are processed on-device
200Hz SLAM tracking rate
6ms Render-to-haptic latency
20ms Wireless motion-to-photon target
1runtime Across headsets, glasses and hubs
Deep dive

Ask us the awkward technical questions

Optical MTF, latency budget, thermal envelope, IPD range, calibration drift over time — bring your engineers and we will bring ours.