HP, MSI and Zotac all announced VR backpacks, which are basically just battery-powered gaming laptops, with shoulder straps this year. And at IFA 2016, I finally got to try one for myself from XMG.
The difference with the German computer maker's "Walker VR Backpack" is that it's the first one that's actually shipping this year. Everyone else's VR backpacks are still concepts with no concrete pricing or launch dates.
The first thing I noticed before putting the Walker on was how dorky it looked. As if wearing the HTC Vive and holding two wand-like controllers in my hands wasn't silly looking, wearing a VR backpack, which at best is still a mess of dangling wires, makes you look like a "geeky version of RoboCop" according to my colleague, Stan Schroeder.
Once worn, though, I was shocked at how light the entire thing felt. At around seven pounds, I was still able to comfortably walk around in my little booth box as I played Space Pirate Trainer, a VR game for the HTC Vive where you're shooting robotic orbs and dodging laser fire.
The VR backpack is powered by an Intel Core i7-6700 HQ process, NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics, up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM and has room for two solid-state drives. It can beam what's happening to a monitor wirelessly and has several ports including an HDMI, DisplayPort, 6 USB ports and an ethernet port.
The biggest hurdle XMG needed to overcome was power management. The Walker uses two huge block batteries, which are good for up to 60 minutes of continuous VR time. It's not very long, but at least you can swap them out for freshly charged ones.
I still think VR backpacks are too over-the-top, but I like being able to have room-scale VR experiences with the Vive without needing to worry about tripping over a huge cable coming out of the headset.
The XMG Walker's not the most elegant VR backpack (HTC's Omen X looks much cleaner), but it's a decent start for VR enthusiasts who want a high-end VR experience on the go. (Not that anyone should be playing games like Space Pirate Trainers in public, anyway.)
The big kicker is its price: 4,799 Euro, which comes out to around $5,353. That's the price without any VR headsets. Yikes.
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