MSI Wants to Power Your VR Headset With a Backpack

Virtual reality headsets like Intel's Project Alloy and Qualcomm's Snapdragon VR have oodles of sensors and powerful but efficient processors that promise an immersive VR experience without being tethered to a PC. But they're months, if not years, away from commercial availability.

If you want that experience now (or as soon as possible), you might consider pairing a current high-end headset with MSI's VR One, a PC in a backpack. It weighs eight pounds, has 90 minutes of battery life, and packs an overclocked Intel Core i7 and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card.

The VR One was born from a concept that MSI announced earlier this year at Computex. It's designed to solve two problems at once: many consumer desktops aren't powerful enough to support an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, and of the ones that are, many are immense gaming PCs.

The VR One resembles the laser tag gear you might have worn as a kid. It's almost entirely black, except for two symmetrical red panels surrounding the MSI logo. The most unique aspect of its design is the battery packs: this backpack uses power-hungry desktop components, so MSI bestowed it with two hot-swappable batteries. Indicator lights on each one show the remaining charge. When it reaches a critical level, you can switch one battery at a time without shutting down the PC or connecting it to external power.

The components are air cooled, with two fan blades and nine heat pipes offering efficient but very quiet air circulation. MSI says noise output will be less than 41 dba, about standard for a desktop.

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As for compatibility, the VR One was developed in partnership with HTC, so it will include support for the Vive out of the box, though it should also run competing headsets like the Rift. The company will announce the backpack's pricing and ship date at the Tokyo Game Show later this week.