Almost two years ago, we launched the XR-4 Series. It was a big step forward for Varjo and for mixed reality as a whole: 51 PPD passthrough, autofocus cameras, and a field of view that made immersive XR feel truly natural.
Since then, many of you have taken XR-4 far beyond our labs in Helsinki. You’ve put it into helicopters, full-motion platforms, domes, hoist-rescue training, and multi-hundred-unit deployments. You’ve stress-tested it in ways only real operations can.
And through that, we’ve learned a lot. Together.
At the XR Global Summit 2025, I announced the next step in that journey. A refreshed XR-4 Series line of headsets, a major new release of Varjo Base, and strengthened commitments around support and service.
Together, these form our most complete solution yet for mission-critical mixed reality training. In this post, I want to explain why we decided to refresh the XR-4 Series now, and what’s new in concrete, practical terms.
Our product vision: “Fit for the mission”, not just the lab
When we first developed the XR-4, we designed it to be easy to put on and take off in studios and office environments. Light on the forehead, well balanced, extremely comfortable.
All of that is still important, but field deployments have made a few additional things very clear.
We now know that the headset must hold steady in a helicopter when you’re looking straight down. It must stay stable on full-motion platforms. It must be reliable enough to power up every time, and stay up for long sessions. It must integrate into complex systems, and not just sit on a desk as a standalone device.
That’s why we made the decision to refresh the XR-4 Series now. The underlying hardware is still exceptionally capable, maintaining the industry-leading specs that defined the fourth generation. What we’re bringing today are meaningful improvements in ergonomics, passthrough fidelity, stability, and large-scale deployability.
In the early deployments, we saw how people actually used the headset: leaning, twisting, kneeling, turning fast, and spending long periods in a non-level position. That led us to reshape XR-4’s ergonomics.
Here’s what changed:
• More contact points on the cheeks
We added extra cushioning on the inner sides of the headset, so it grips the cheeks more firmly. This reduces lateral movement of the headset when your head moves quickly.
• A lower, more secure rear headband
Instead of sitting straight across the back of the head, the rear band now sits lower and hooks down. This creates a stronger anchor point and improves overall stability.
• An optional chin strap
For some missions, especially in extreme environments or motion platforms, a chin strap adds an important extra degree of security. So it’s now available as an option.
• Slimmed back profile and improved cable routing
We saw that with high-back seats, the old rear box could interfere with head movement. The new XR-4 back profile is noticeably slimmer, and the cable can now be routed either up or down depending on your simulator or cockpit setup.
Individually, these might seem like small changes. But taken together, they’re a direct reflection of our focus on real operational use cases, not theoretical ones.
Passthrough is one of the most challenging aspects of mixed reality, requiring a broad field of view, enough detail to clearly read small labels, dials, and controls, and natural, believable visuals that match the expectations of the human eye, an eye that is remarkably adaptive to changing conditions.
With the XR-4, we made a big leap with 51 pixels per degree and autofocus cameras. But we weren’t finished. Based on your feedback and our own testing, we’ve now:
• Expanded the effective field of view of passthrough
In the first XR-4 Focal Edition, the vertical passthrough FOV was limited, and you could see a “black notch” in the lower area. In real deployments, we noticed that virtual content typically sits higher, and reality (cockpit, controls, hands, kneeboards) sits lower.
So we shifted the passthrough window down. In the refreshed Focal Edition, passthrough now covers the bottom half of the display, giving you a full usable field of view where you actually interact with the real environment.
• Tilted the cameras down by 10°
The cameras have their highest resolution in the center of their field of view. Cockpits and controls, however, sit slightly below eye level. By tilting the cameras down by just 10 degrees, we bring dials and instruments directly into that sweet spot. The result is simple: sharper, more readable instruments and labels where you need them.
• Expanded and accelerated foveated rendering
At the XR-4 launch, the sharp “foveal” area was quite small and concentrated in the center. Some of you told us you wanted the entire screen, especially the full MFDs, to be sharp. We’ve therefore significantly increased the size of the high-resolution region, and made it follow your eyes about a third faster than before. In practice, that makes foveation much less noticeable, and in many cases, hard to detect at all.
• Improved color accuracy in passthrough
In certain conditions, green vs. white indicators could sometimes appear too similar. We’ve corrected that in Varjo Base 4.12 so that, for example, a “green is full” indicator is clearly distinguishable from “white is empty” in video passthrough. That might sound like a detail, but in mission-critical contexts, details are exactly what matter.
When we first launched the XR-4 Series, customers had to choose between an inside-out tracking model or a SteamVR base-station version, often before fully validating which approach worked best in their environment. With the refreshed XR-4, that tradeoff is gone. Every headset now includes both improved inside-out tracking and full SteamVR support in a single unit, giving you maximum flexibility for any deployment.
We’ve seen inside-out tracking now deployed successfully in dark rooms, domes, and even on full motion platforms. Having both options built into every headset gives you maximum flexibility and future-proofs your setup.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen deployments involving hundreds of headsets across large organizations. That has highlighted two key themes: PC compatibility and system stability.
PC Compatibility: Reducing Friction
The XR-4 is a bandwidth-hungry device, especially due to the high-resolution passthrough. That places a significant burden on USB connectivity, and not all PCs handle that equally well.
To simplify this, every XR-4 Secure Edition now ships with a PCIe USB expansion card. If your onboard USB ports don’t perform as needed, you can plug in a verified card designed to work with the XR-4 Series.
As we test a huge number of PCs internally, we’re also preparing validated PC + headset bundles. This will make it much easier to order a configuration you know will work reliably from day one.
Stability: Redesigning the Link Box
We know very well that a headset used for training must start up every time without fail and stay up and running for long sessions. Working closely with many of you, we identified how updates to one component, the link box between the PC and the headset, could ensure the stability required for mission critical training.
We’ve now fully redesigned the link box. The new version:
• Ships with all new XR-4 units
• Is available to existing XR-4 customers who experience link-related issues
This single change resolves the majority of stability problems we’ve seen.
A Clearer Software Release Strategy
We’ve been releasing Varjo Base updates roughly every two months, and each one has brought meaningful improvements. However, for some of you, the pace has made it harder to maintain stable field deployments.
From next year onward, we’ll introduce a clearer split:
• Beta channel – Latest features, ideal for lab testing and early validation
• Stable channel – Less frequent, highly validated releases intended for field deployment and long-term use
This way, you can decide whether you want the “latest and greatest” or the “most field-tested” for each environment.
Increasingly, our headsets are delivered not as standalone devices, but as components in larger training systems. That shift has also changed how we think about software and support.
Command Line Interface (CLI)
Many of you asked for ways to run eye calibration, control headset power states, and integrate status and device controls directly into your own dashboards or physical panels.
In Varjo Base 4.12, we introduced a command line interface (CLI) that allows you to integrate Varjo functionality directly into your own systems. If your end-users never see Varjo Base, that’s fine. Our goal is to enable the best overall simulation experience, not just a standalone headset experience.
Solution Engineering & Co-Development
We’ve also evolved how we work with you. Our solution engineers (The Varjo Alpha team) now spend significant time on-site, tuning masks, optimizing lighting, and helping refine your environments. Many of them have thousands of hours of experience in customer deployments.
When something can’t be solved with configuration alone, we’re open to co-developing new functionality, whether that’s a new mixed reality feature, a helmet mount, or a custom integration. Many of the features I’ve described today actually began as custom work for early partners.
For many of you, security is non-negotiable.
To meet this absolute requirement, on the manufacturing side, we now build many of our headsets in our own facility in Helsinki. That gives us full control over the manufacturing and supply chain for these devices
On the software side, we work closely with agencies to secure the accreditations required for operational deployment. For example, we’ve secured certification to allow deployment of Varjo headsets into certain US Air Force environments. We’re also on track with ISO/IEC 27001 for information security
These investments are ongoing and central to our strategy.
Beyond performance and deployability, I want to highlight a few new feature-level capabilities that are already changing how mixed reality training is done.
Hand Tracking
When the XR-4 Series launched, we partnered with UltraLeap for hand tracking, and that integration remains available.
In parallel, we’ve developed our own built-in hand tracking algorithms, which require no additional hardware, are available for all Varjo users and provide a straightforward, out-of-the-box way to use hands as input in mixed-reality scenarios.
Hand Occlusion: Seeing Your Real Hands in Virtual Content
We all know that simple “skeleton” VR hands are not enough in mixed reality. You want to see your real hands interacting with real and virtual controls.
In Varjo Base 4.12, we’ve introduced hand occlusion, which uses the passthrough cameras and on-device algorithms to segment your hands from the background in real time. This makes your real hands appear naturally in front of virtual objects, enabling hybrid training scenarios where some cockpit elements are physical, others are virtualized, and hand interactions remain accurate and believable throughout.
It’s a small visual effect with a big impact on immersion and training realism.
Night Mode: Realistic Night Training in Mixed Reality
Night training is a critical requirement for many of you, and in Varjo Base 4.12 we’ve introduced Night Mode to support it. This feature dynamically adjusts passthrough brightness and contrast to simulate a nighttime environment even when the real room lights are on, and keeps cockpit lighting consistent with the virtual outside world.
This gives you much more control over training scenarios, without needing to physically darken or modify your training facility (and degrade passthrough quality in the process.)
I want to be clear: what follows is not a set of product commitments. Rather, it’s a view into areas we’re actively exploring, so you can start thinking about how they might fit into your roadmaps.
AI-Upscaled Passthrough
Because the XR-4 is powered by a PC, we can tap into significant compute capacity, and one area we’re actively experimenting with is using AI to upscale passthrough video particularly to improve clarity in peripheral areas, using models trained specifically on cockpit-like scenes.
There are still challenges around frame rate and avoiding visual “hallucinations,” but I’m confident this will eventually be a significant step forward, and one we can deliver as a software upgrade, with no new headset required.
AI-Based Object Masking & Tracking
We’re also investigating AI-based masking and tracking using the passthrough cameras, enabling scenarios such as automatically masking an entire cockpit, tracking weapons or tools without the need for markers or pucks, and segmenting a co-pilot in real time.
This could simplify deployment and open new kinds of mixed-virtual configurations.
Richer Data for Mission Debrief & Training Analytics
Finally, I think we’ve only scratched the surface of how we can use the data from the XR-4 Series (eye tracking, head pose, and scene understanding) to deliver deeper insights into trainee performance and operational behavior.
We can already track what a pilot is looking at and when. By labeling key cockpit elements (displays, switches, throttles) we can combine that with gaze data to enable semantic debriefing; What was the pilot looking at when a certain event occurred? Did they scan the right instruments at the right times? Were they overloaded in a particular phase of the mission?
I believe this can give instructors richer feedback and, in some cases, make them more productive when training at scale.
The refreshed XR-4, our latest Varjo Base release, and our evolving services aren’t about a shiny new headline spec. They’re about something more important:
Making the XR-4 Series truly fit for the mission in real-world, mission-critical training.
We’ve improved ergonomics, passthrough, tracking, stability, PC compatibility, integration options, security, and feature-level capabilities like hand occlusion and night mode—all guided by your feedback and deployments.
I’m excited to see what you build with this next chapter of the XR-4 Series, and I’m even more excited to continue shaping the roadmap with you.
— Patrick
Watch Patrick's full keynote at the 2025 XR Global Summit where he introduces the newly refreshed XR-4 Series here.