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Samsung upgraded its mixed reality headset to make you less prone to barfing

Samsung on Monday launched the HMD Odyssey+, an upgraded version of its original Odyssey mixed reality headset with an improved display designed to reduce dizziness and nausea.

Like the original model, the Odyssey+ sports a pair of 3.5-inch AMOLED displays with a resolution of 1440x1600 per eye at 90Hz, and a 110-degree field of view. However, Samsung is touting an improved display technology that purportedly reduces pattern noise for a "perceived PPI of 1,233."

Samsung is talking about what is commonly referred to as the screen door effect. Unlike sitting a few feet away from a PC monitor, VR and mixed reality headsets cram the displays just a few inches away from your eyeballs. This allows you to more easily see individual pixels, like a screen door, and can make some people nauseous. Samsung is claiming it's figured out a way around this without having to pack more pixels into the display.

How is this possible? Samsung says its display tech "solves SDE by applying a grid that diffuses light coming from each pixel and replicating the picture to areas around each pixel. This makes the spaces between pixels near impossible to see. In result, your eyes perceive the diffused light as part of the visual content, with a perceived PPI of 1,233 PPI, double that of the already high 616 PPI of the previous generation Samsung HMD Odyssey+."

Whether it works as advertised or not is something we won't know until we've had a chance to test it out.

Other features include built-in 360-degree spatial sound support, 6 degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking, and Bluetooth support. It's not yet available to purchase, but will be soon for $499.99. That's the same launch price as the original Odyssey, which has been marked down to $349 in the Microsoft Store.
