We haven’t heard much about Sony’s SRH-S1 standalone MR headset over the past year, which the company revealed at CES 2024. Now, the enterprise-focused device has an official launch date and price.
Released in collaboration with Siemens, the soberly-named Sony SRH-S1 is set to launch sometime in February 2025, priced at $4,750, which the companies are squarely aiming at enterprise. Orders begin on January 23rd, 2025, purchasable directly through Siemens.
While previously pitched last year to appeal to creatives, Sony and Siemens are clearly targeting industrial use cases; the companies say SRH-S1 will “enable the industrial metaverse” and enhance product design and manufacturing through Siemens’ set of high-fidelity mixed reality tools.
Offering 13.6MP (3,552 × 3840) per-eye using Sony’s own ECX344A OLED microdisplay and a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, the headset also packs in what Sony calls a “proprietary rendering technology” for real-time 3D object rendering.
As a mixed reality device, Sony’s SRH-S1 also includes passthrough video, a flip-up visor, and a unique pair of ergonomic controllers designed for intuitive 3D interactions, presented in the form of a stylus-type pointer and ring.
Over the past year, Siemens has also refined its set of enterprise-focused Immersive Engineering tools, which aim to let SRH-S1 users design 3D assets in CAD, interact with models, and remotely conduct multi-user design reviews via Siemens’ cloud-based NX X platform.
“After previewing the HMD at CES last year, our collective teams have built a set of tools that revolutionize how mixed reality is used in the engineering space – to not only support global collaboration based on high-fidelity 3D models, but to enable co-creation directly on vital 3D CAD data in a managed, secure environment,” said Bob Haubrock, senior VP of Product Engineering Software at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
This follows the announcement at CES this week that Sony is set to launch a creative-focused headset for prosumers, called XYN, which for now doesn’t have a price or release date. While Sony is staying tight-lipped on XYN, which is said to be a prototype at this stage, it appears to indeed be a variant of SRH-S1, denoted externally by its black colorway in comparison to SRH-S1’s grey design.
