Developed in partnership with Microsoft, Acer will ship a developer edition of its first mixed reality (MR) headset later this month, with the new device set to be shown in New York in April when Acer will reveal their 2017 line-up of notebooks and gaming machines which include devices running the new AMD Ryzen chipsets.
According the Economic Daily News (EDN) the new MR headset which works on entry level notebooks and top end gaming machines will include both headset hardware and a software development kit (SDK) that will enable partners to develop and test MR applications across Windows 10 devices.
The MR device does not need a high-performance PC systems claims Acer sources.
Microsoft’s planned release of Windows 10 Creator Update in 2017 will help promote the popularity of the MR applications, the report said.
Microsoft is developing related MR headsets with the world’s top-five PC vendors, they aim to roll out MR headsets with prices starting at around A$399.
According to Acer Taiwan management, Acer will focus their PC marketing in 2017 on two key product lines, slim and gaming notebooks and gaming notebooks.
Dave Lin operations president at Acer told the DigiTimes that global shipments of slim notebooks and gaming notebooks in 2016 increased 10% and 30% respectively year on year.
Due to tight supply of DRAM, NAND flash, display panels and SSDs, Acer’s PC production costs in the first quarter of 2017 are estimated to rise 3-5% on quarter, Lin said. Acer will absorb the increased cost and will not hike PC prices for the time being, Lin indicated.
In addition, Acer will increase the shipment proportion for notebooks equipped with 4GB RAM and decrease that for models equipped with 8GB RAM to reduce the impact of the cost increase, Lin said.
Acer will launch Predator 21X, a 21-inch gaming notebooks featuring Thunderbolt 3, and a RAID 0 configuration of up to four 512GB SSDs and a 1TB 7,200RPM hard disk drive, in the Taiwan market in March. In addition, Acer will launch high-end gaming Predator 17X, Predator 17 and Predator 15 models as well as mainstream gaming V-Nitro 17, V-Nitro 15, VX15 and VX5-591G models.
