At CES I was able to go hands-on with one of the most hyped PC VR headsets of the moment, the Shiftall MeganeX Superlight 8K, and two of its associated controllers, the Shiftall GripVR and Shiftall FlipVR. In this article I will tell all my detailed first impressions about these devices, highlighting the reasons to be excited about and the less enticing ones. There is a shiftload of things to say, so let’s get straight to my review!
(Usual disclaimer before we start: I tried these pieces of hardware at an event for some minutes, which is insufficient to write an exhaustive review. An objective review of a headset requires days of tests, so take whatever I write here with a grain of salt)
Hands-on Shiftall MeganeX Superlight 8K
At CES, it was the second time I tried the MeganeX Superlight 8K, with the first being at AWE Europe 2024. I had already written a hands-on article during that event, but this time I had time to test the headset more thoroughly, so I am writing a new article to describe this headset in more detail.
Specifications
- Display: 1.35 inch Micro OLED / 10 bit
- Resolution: 3552 x 3840 per eye
- Refresh Rate: 90Hz
- HDR: Supported
- Lenses: Pancake
- Interpupillary Distance (IPD): 58-72 mm (electrically adjustable)
- Focus Adjustment: 0D to -7D
- Audio:
- Integrated speakers: No
- Microphone: Built-in dual microphones with beam-forming
- Connectivity
- PC: DisplayPort + USB 2.0
- Headset side: USB Type-C
- Weight: Less than 185g
Design
The Shiftall MeganeX Superlight 8K is a very small headset. It is made with an elegant black, but the headset does not have an elegant design. I would say it privileges utility over aesthetics, and in fact, it crudely shows without problems all the rails of its many fitting systems. The headset per se is made with very straight shapes on the front. The rear of the headset is just an elastic band.
It is not a pretty headset, but considering that it is aimed at enthusiasts, probably it shouldn’t even be.
Here are a lot of pictures I shot of the product, so you can see it from various points of view:
Comfort
The Shiftall MeganeX Superlight 8K is called “superlight” for a reason: it is very small and it weighs less than 180g (for comparison, the original Vive weighed around 470g). This makes it very comfortable to wear, also for long periods. Looking at the elastic strap, you may be tempted to think that not having any balance on the back of the head may make the headset too front-heavy, but it is not: it is so lightweight that it creates no discomfort on the face, at all.
The headset has been over-engineered for comfort. First of all, it is made so that it doesn’t apply pressure on the face. The hinge of the headset is made so that it touches your face but doesn’t apply any force to it. The elastic headband that you fit around your head is not connected to the headset “box” as you may expect, but it is connected to the piece that goes on your forehead, and then the part with the visual system is connected with a hinge to the forehead harness. This means that even if you tighten the headband too much, you apply pressure on your forehead, and not on your face, which is much more sensitive. The headset only touches your face and I guess is even better to let more air circulate when you are in a long XR session. This makes the headset feel much more comfortable. The disadvantage is that the fact that the headset only slightly touched my face gave me the impression that the headset was not exactly locked to my face, as if it was not exactly fixed in place. The Shiftall people told me that it may be because the version showcased was thought for Asian heads, so I had to tweak its parameters more to fit my Western head.
The facemask is made in silicon and it is full of ridges. It has been optimized for comfort, too, but actually, I don’t like it much. I think that sponge facemasks are much more comfortable for personal and private usage than silicon ones.
MeganeX Superlight has also many adjustments for comfort, many more than any other headset I am aware of: it is like it has been designed together with my favorite VR ergonomics expert Rob Cole. There is a little wheel in every lower corner of the device to adjust the diopter parameter for every eye, so that you can adjust vision to your eye impairment.
There is a button to adjust the eye relief, that is to move the headset back and forth to accommodate glasses, or to make the headset as close as possible to your eyes to have a wider FOV.
There is even a little dial you can rotate to change the rotation of the headset to accommodate the skewing angle of your forehead!!! If you don’t believe it, you can see it in action in this little GIF here below.
There is also a little button that you can press to flip up the headset so that you can take a short break from VR without having to remove the device. I learned that there is a button to press the hard way: I was trying to flip up the headset without pressing anything and since it was not flipping, I started applying more force, risking breaking everything, until the CEO of Shiftall stopped me…
The headset has been made to accommodate every possible user with every possible head shape and I really praise Shiftall for that. Comfort is a very important feature if we want people to use VR for long periods of time and Shiftall invested a lot of attention on that. From my little time with the device, I can say I felt it very comfortable on my head, so kudos to the engineers.
Visuals
MeganeX Superlight 8K employs two 4K micro OLED displays. The company is also proud to have designed lenses that are optimized to give a very high definition to the VR scene. The result is very good: the resolution is very high, and the definition is simply incredible. There is no screen door effect at all. With its 3552 x 3840 pixels per eye, this headset truly shines. Since the use of OLED screens, the colors are also vivid, and the blacks are truly back. Tyriel Wood, who was with me, made me notice that the colors were a bit darker than in other OLED-based headsets, and this is true. But I also think that a game like Half-Life: Alyx looked very well on this display.
The CEO of Shiftall told me that the lenses are so good that it’s hard to notice if you are rendering the game at half or full resolution. So I tried Alyx at 50% rendering resolution and then at 100% and I can tell you that I don’t know what black magic was there, but I noticed almost no difference for real.
The visuals of this headset have their imperfections, though. The FOV is smaller than the typical VR headset: the company claims the vertical FOV is the same as Quest 3, but the horizontal one is less. This is to be expected from a MicroOLED-based device. Plus looking at the lenses, I’ve noticed that while at the center of the lens, the visuals are very good, towards the periphery there are chromatic and spherical aberrations. Even worse, there is a very light warping in the visuals that you can see if you rotate your head. The CEO of the company told me that probably if I adjusted my fit more, this slight warping would disappear, but no matter what I did, it was always there for me. Distortions seem any way to be better than I reported from AWE six months ago: there I noticed a constant Barrel distortion profile, while here, I noticed a slight warping only when moving my head. There are also some glares sometimes noticeable in some scenes.
Audio
The headset does not offer integrated audio, so there is nothing to review on this side.
Tracking
MeganeX Superlight 8K works with SteamVR tracking, which is very precise and reliable. The problem with such a small device is that being small, it offers few reference points to the tracking, so as long as something is occluding the headset, the tracking starts having issues. I had issues on this side when I tried this headset at AWE, where my hand close to the device was occluding some of its sensors, preventing it from tracking properly. But at CES, I did not have these problems, probably also because there was a better setup of Lighthouse stations.
For this edition, there are no plans to release a version with inside-out camera tracking. Maybe this could be added to future versions. I think it is great they are focusing on only one tracking type instead of making a mess with many different versions of the headset.
Mount
The headset can be worn on the head using the headband, or it can also be installed on a “theater handle” for casual quick usage. This is very good for public installations where people just have to try a quick viewing passive experience like a 360 video. You don’t want all people to wear the headset, with women also ruining their makeup. So you can make people just grab the handle and gently put the headset close to their face, for added hygiene and comfort. This is a smart solution I have been able to try at AWE, but not at CES.
PC requirements
The minimum PC requirements listed on the MeganeX 8K website mention an NVIDIA RTX3070 graphics card, while the recommended ones suggest an NVIDIA RTX4070: they have been confirmed to me by the company during the demo. The demo at CES was happening with a laptop boasting an RTX4090 graphics card. Notwithstanding the use of this monster graphics card, I still had occasional stutterings while playing Half-Life: Alyx at full resolution. Given the very high resolution of the display panels and the impossibility of using foveated rendering because of the lack of eye tracking, this headset requires a lot of computational power to work properly.
PC software
There is a companion PC software that offers many customizations on how you want to use this headset when it is attached to the computer.
Price and availability
MeganeX Superlight 8K can be ordered on the Shiftall website for the whopping price of $1,899. Shipping is expected in February-March 2025. Of course, the price does not include other accessories, like SteamVR base stations, controllers, or audio headphones.
Hands-on Shiftall GripVR controllers
The GripVR controllers are a sort of big Valve Knuckles that Shiftall is proposing to its users.
Design
The controllers are really like a mix of big bulky Valve Knuckles and Oculus Touch controllers. They feel very sturdy, the build quality is pretty nice. The all-black design makes them feel very elegant. Here you are some photos I shot at them
Input
The input scheme offered by these controllers is the same of many others out there: a thumbstick, AB/XY buttons, a system button, a trigger button, and a grip button. All the buttons are capacitive, with the exception of the grip, as happens on the Oculus controllers.
Comfort
I have to say I am not a big fan of the comfort of these controllers. They feel big and heavy: Shiftall says they weigh as Valve Index Controllers, but to me, they seem a bit heavier. The big problem is that the weight seems skewed towards the rings, so they feel unbalanced. When holding them, my hands tend to naturally rotate following the weight of the ring, which is not good.
Also, the buttons are positioned in such a way that my hand could not find a position where it felt fully comfortable in pressing both the upper buttons, the grip, and the trigger buttons.
Comfort is very subjective and I can say that those controllers didn’t suit my hand well. I have a pretty average hand, so this is not a great sign.
Tracking
I’ve not been able to try these controllers, so I can not judge their tracking quality. Since they work with SteamVR tracking, I guess their tracking is precise and reliable, though.
Price and availability
Shiftall’s GripVR is targeting launch sometime this summer at the estimated price of $299-$399.
FlipVR controllers
The FlipVR controllers are an innovative product by Shiftall: they are controllers that can be flipped away so that you can have your hands free to perform other activities when you are not playing with VR.
Design
The Shiftall FlipVR controllers have a pretty unusual shape. They are strapped to the palm using a plastic bar and some Velcro strips. At the end of the plastic bar, there is a hinge to which is attached the actual controller. You can make this hinge flip by applying a fast motion of the hand, putting the actual controller inside your hand, or outside of it, hence the FlipVR name. Design-wise, they look pretty ugly, but they can be pretty useful. Let me share with you some photos I took of them:
Input
The input scheme offered by these controllers is the same as many others out there: a thumbstick, AB/XY buttons, a system button, a trigger button, and a grip button. All the buttons are capacitive, except the grip, like it happens on the Oculus controllers. In the beginning, I thought that because of the weird shape of the controller, the buttons would have been hard to find and use, but actually, they felt only slightly smaller and less ergonomic than the ones of a standard controller.
Haptics
The controllers featured some sort of haptic feedback. It was not very strong, but it was there.
Comfort
The controllers are tight to the hand thanks to two elastic bands featuring velcro strips. There is a cursor that is used to tighten or loosen the bands, and then the velcro is used to fully close the band, so there are no floating extremities. The first time I couldn’t understand how to make them fit my hands, and people from Shiftall had to help me.
Plus always in the beginning, when flipping the controllers in, the various input buttons were not where I expected them to be. I spent some time adjusting the controllers to truly fit my hands, and after I did, the comfort was very good. I did not feel them as heavy, or unbalanced… they fit well with my hand.
Tracking
These controllers are tracked with SteamVR and the tracking is so precise and reliable. I tried to occlude one controller with the other one, but tracking still persisted, and this is a good sign of robustness.
The company already had the model of the controllers inside the SteamVR software, showing great attention to detail. Many companies just leave there the standard Vive or Oculus controller models, but Shiftall puts one of the real controllers and that’s great.
Flipping the controllers
The ability to flip the controllers is amazing. In the beginning, I thought it was a gimmick, but then I realized it was actually quite useful. Every time you need to use the bare hands for whatever reason, you can flip the controllers out, do what you have to do, and then flip the controllers in to play again. One clear use case is for us developers: we can test our VR game, then flip out the controllers, fix some bugs in the code typing on the keyboard, and then flip the controllers in and try the new version of the application. This is much more comfortable than taking the controllers and putting them down every time. Other use cases are when you have to use your hand to drink, type a message, or something like that. I had to blow my nose while I was demoing the device, so I just flipped out a controller, took a napkin, did what I had to do, flipped in the controller, and continued the demo. I did it very naturally, without even thinking. You can see this in my video with the hands-on the Superlight 8K headset and the FlipVR controllers:
After a while, I was in love with the flipping mechanics. It is actually very handy (pun intended) and I wonder how I lived so many years in VR without it. Shiftall people love it too and one of the girls of the company came to the XR afterparty with the controllers on the hands flipped out, so she could still drink beer and party with us, but without leaving her controllers at home. The controller has a velcro on the back, so you can leave it permanently flipped out if you don’t want to use it for a long period of time.
Of course, I have big concerns about what happens if you keep flipping in and out the controllers many times. Mechanical hinges tend to break over time. But I have to say that the controllers we were using have been overused for the demo the whole day and the hinge was still working very well. This means they have at least some durability.
Battery Life
The website says the controllers have an estimated battery life of 8 hours.
Price and availability
FlipVR controllers will be available in Japan in February 2025 and will be available in the rest of the world later. Their price is $399 for a pair.
The best XR demo at CES
The demo with Shiftall was the best I had at CES. I’m not talking in terms of the best product on the show floor (even if the headset and the FlipVR controllers are surely good products) but in terms of the quality of the experience. Takuma “TK” Iwasa, the CEO of the company, was with us in this hotel room providing the demo personally and he guided us in every moment. He was available to answer every question, he was very open in admitting every problem with the headset, he listened to every feedback, he helped us in taking the pictures, and he made us try everything we wanted to try. And he was speaking with us in good English, something that is not always easy for Asian people.
I really appreciated his passion, his commitment, and his availability. He did his best to ensure we had a great experience. I think he’s a great person and I wish him a great success.
Final Considerations
Shiftall for sure is a company able to create interesting products: I have tried its headset and controllers, but actually, also other products like the HaritoraX tracking system, are pretty cool.
Even if everyone is praising its MeganeX SuperLight 8K headset, my favorite product of the demo was the FlipXR controllers. These controllers work very well and have the flipping functionality which is very useful for people who need to have long VR sessions where in the middle they can be interrupted. I was skeptical about this design until I tried it: it is effective and it proved to be useful during the demo itself. I am just concerned about the durability of the hinge, but my first impressions of it are otherwise very positive. Surely they are not cheap, costing more than $100 more than the Index Controllers.
The Shiftall MeganeX Superlight 8K headset was also a solid product. But its main problem is that it feels overpriced to me: $1900 to have just the headset is a bit too much. I know that micro OLEDs are hard to source and that this headset offers some unique features, but for $1900, it is possible to buy almost two BigScreen Beyond and three Pimax Crystal Light. In any case, for people for which graphical definition and/or comfort are the most important features, this headset may be what they are looking for. The crispness of this device is incredible, and the comfort settings, are pretty unique.
The GripVR controllers did not impress me, though. I think they need some rework, especially on the comfort side.
In general, I wish the best of luck to this company and its CEO TK Iwasa, hoping he will able to find a niche of VR enthusiasts that are going to buy his interesting, yet expensive, products.
I hope you enjoyed this article, and if this is the case, share it with your peers on all your social media to support my work as an independent XR blogger. And subscribe to my newsletter so as not to miss my next interesting post about AR/VR technologies!
(Thanks Tyriel Wood for having shot the videos of this article and for having been a cool CES-mate!)
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