HP plans to bring VR to the masses using the most unlikely laptop

HP Chromebook

HP is planning to bring virtual reality to Chromebooks in the future, with some form of web-based VR experience.

And that's certainly a very interesting idea, given that virtual reality with a Windows PC is generally speaking an expensive proposition (particularly when hardware such as the Oculus Rift is priced at £500, and the PC necessary to run it well has to have a beefy graphics card that doesn't come cheap).

Laptops running Chrome OS can be very cheap indeed, although what HP is talking about implementing is "blended reality" features that include VR and 3D printing, according to the firm's executives who spilled a few details about the plans this week.

Web wizardry

In other words, this isn't a hardware thing, rather it's about deploying tools which can be used for the creation of 3D content for VR, and delivering some form of web-based VR to relatively low-specced Chromebooks – although no details have been imparted about exactly how this will work.

We'll hear more on the tech involved soon enough, with any luck, but for now we can only ponder exactly what HP is driving at. Whatever it is, though, if it pertains to providing a cheap VR experience, it will doubtless be welcomed by many who don't fancy emptying their bank account in order to be able to step into a virtual reality world.

HP recently unveiled its new Sprout Pro all-in-one, which comes with an integrated projector and 3D scanner, along with updated components such as a Skylake Core i7 CPU. The company has also just revealed a new convertible Chromebook (pictured above).

Via: Computerworld

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).