PiMax 8K

Boasting the biggest FOV yet, with a 200 degree FOV, the PiMax blows all the competition out of the water, and is described by many early tester as "What VR should have been since Day Once".

Each screen will display up to 8K content, and once again beats out the competition by getting rid of one of the long-time issues that was plaguing the first headsets, the infamous "Screen Door Effect”. Wherein, the first generation of headsets has screen resolution that were so low, that at such a short distance the individual pixels became apparent, and the entire image would look like it was being seen through an old screen-door.

At these increased resolutions, it is reported that the SDE completely disappears. Finally, it works in conjunction with the pre-existing Trackers and controllers of the Vive, and therefore the benefits and precision of this device are transferred over, making it the absolute best in the current market.

Desktop

Hidden within the belly of the beast if one of the latest Motherboards, a Z370 model, which is the only model able to support the top-of-the-range i7 coffee-lake CPUs.

Combined with this is a pair of overclocked Samsung B-Die, CAS 14, 3200 Mhz 16Gb of DDR4 RAM. More than anything, the RAM is meant to pair nicely with the CPU, and offer an even higher amount of fps at the demanding 8K resolution.

The last piece of the puzzle is the Power Supply Unit (PSU). Luckily most of these components are designed to be highly efficient, and so a 750 Watt should handle that well enough. A welcome touch is that of a Solid State Drive (SSD) which acts just like a Hard Drive, but does not rely on physical movement to retrieve information, and therefore is able to work 5-10 times faster.

i7 8700K

Intel’s top-of-the-line i7-8700K, nicknamed Coffee Lake, is the next 14nm CPU design after Kaby Lake, which Intel is calling 14nm++. Featuring six cores and 12 threads, 12MB of L3 cache, and a boost clock up to 4.7GHz. It is the best CPU out as of October, and will last for years to come, thanks to its “K” iteration, allowing users to increase the performance being the recommended specs through overclocking; essentially unlocking more power from the already frightfully powerful core, by overcharging its power intake.

Asus 1080Ti Strix OC

Powered by an NVIDIA Pascal chip, the ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce GTX 1080TI OC Edition is the most powerful gaming GPU to date; delivering jaw-dropping 5K HD gaming experiences with 11GB GDDR5X memory and 1708 MHz boost clock.

This is the absolute minimum required GPU to push the latest graphics to the highest VR screen resolution and refresh rates of 90fps.

Extensive Video of
Upcoming Headsets and Games

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The price of all three major VR headsets has dropped since first coming out, and there have been of lot of new VR games, but which headset will be considered as coming out on top?

Elaboration on why VR is a: "Tomorrow's Technology, Today"

Both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive went on sale a year ago, the first VR headsets to offer truly immersive virtual reality gaming. Unlike the many mobile VR experiences that had come before them (such as Google Cardboard) and worked by positioning a smartphone screen in front of your eyes, these headsets allow for players to move through three-dimensional worlds made in intricate detail - provided of course that you have a powerful enough PC to connect them to.

In this higher tier of VR headsets you can add the PlayStation VR, or PSVR, though of course the difference between it and the Vive and Rift is that you hook this one up to a PlayStation 4 rather than a gaming PC. It went on sale in October 2016, a few months after the debuts of the Rift and the Vive, and obviously is unable to compete in terms of performance with a GPU that can costs up to twice the price of an entire PS4.

Mobile VR headsets have been around for even longer, lead by the Samsung Gear VR, which was first released in November 2015 and has been through several iterations since. The likes of Google's Daydream View and various other rival products are now also available too, headsets that you plug your smartphone into. They cannot offer the graphical performance of the top headsets, but they're also consequently a lot more affordable.

So, if you haven’t taken the plunge into virtual reality just yet, you might be tempted to now - but is the timing right?

If you think back to just a decade ago, math teachers around the globe were telling their students: “you might as well get used to not using a calculator, it’s not like everyone will be walking around with one in their pocket”. Obviously, with the advent of smartphones, that statement has not aged well.
In language courses we are confronted with the very same phenomenon, where students will feel exasperated by activities asking them to imagine being in more and more elaborate situations, so that they can practice “X” grammar point:

“You are in the library, ask to borrow a book”

“You are organizing a trip with your partner, play the roles of the customer and the travel agent”

“You have just invented time travel, and have decided to go back in time, and speak to your younger self, use the correct conjugation, and adverb agreement, knowing that at this time in your life you are unsure of want knowledge you have of the current geo-political struggle between the US and the USSR …”

Hopefully VR will be able to do away with all the wasted concentration on picturing the context, and rather BE IN the context, and use language because it will feel more natural when right in the middle of an authentic looking context. .

These VR headsets are also being used in several different industries, such as food service, and many manual labor jobs, where the authentic context created by the VR headset is able to better put new trainees in-situ, so they can learn faster and without harming themselves or others. From a purely testing and teaching perspective, it also unlocks one of the great principals of testing which is the ability to give several participants the same test specifications, in the same conditions, several times over. VR satisfies this by providing an exact same set of rules, for the exact same environment, and can be reset an infinite amount of times, the only changing factor is the participant themselves.

Once we considered the fact that VR is now being fully taken advantage of in sectors as global and prominent as the gaming, social media, and service industries; it is only a matter of time before the education sector has to admit that VR is an essential educational tool. What we are doing here is to therefore get ahead of the curve and be at the top, when others start to realize it too.

Important facts
to keep in mind

VR is a widely accessible tool, that just about anybody can acquire and set up, given the basic knowledge provided here. The only drawback is one that will always be at the center of human debate, money.

That is why it is imperative to considered all the options, as several cheaper versions of what is offered here will still work adequately, and the beauty of a PC is that each of its separate component can be updated at any time, without having to replace the entire machine.

Finally, the possibilities of integrating it into an educational setting are limitless, as we are slowly trending more and more to including all sorts of technological advances into the class room.