NOON VR Headset Review

Virtual reality is an answer looking for a question. It started with the Virtual Boy and its historic failure, but with more and more competitors moving past Nintendo’s nightmare and joining the technological arms race, we’re finally on the right path to proper VR. We’re still a ways away from perfecting it, but that’s kind of a good thing, because we still need to figure out what to do with it. Gaming is the obvious choice, but Korea-based newcomer NextCore, with its NOON smartphone headset, says it’s not the only one.

NOON is of the B camp of virtual reality, the one that has you first strap your smartphone to a headset and only then strap a headset to your face. Camp A, populated by Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus and so on, skips the foreplay and goes right to making you look an idiot. Indeed, VR may never be sexy. You could be flipping a nickel, chewing on a toothpick, sporting a leather jacket and leaning on the dragon you just slew, but putting a plastic brick over your eyes would still render you a doofus.

The instruction manual is too accurate.

But you can at least be a comfortable doofus, as I was while wearing the NOON. The headset weighs just eight ounces, so even after the addition of my smartphone (a Moto X2) it felt like little more than a lavish hat. A thick rim of padding coupled with adjustable straps makes it easy to keep things in place without noticeable pressure. If anything, my head was going to explode from embarrassment rather than discomfort.

Moreover, even after an hour of perusing, motion sickness never came to mind. I’ve never been prone to nausea, but without any way of interacting with the simulated images, there will always be discrepancy between what your brain sees and what your body feels, which is ultimately what leads to the VR-curious getting intimate with toilet bowls. Fortunately, there’s none of that here. At least not for me; your mileage may vary.

Your NOON experience will largely be determined by your phone. Anything bigger than 4.7 inches but small enough to be owned by a sane human being is fair game thanks to an adjustable strap on the front, but weight, battery life and screen quality are extremely important. Too heavy and you’ll wind up adjusting the headset like a pair of taped-up glasses, and you don’t need the help looking like a nerd, trust me. As for battery life, you should count yourself lucky to get two hours out of a full charge—even luckier if your phone doesn’t melt during that time.

Screen quality is the real sticking point. After all, the NOON itself is just a bunch of plastic and lenses; your phone does all the work. That’s a big chunk of why the headset itself is just $89, but it’s also the NOON’s biggest problem. Phone screens were not designed to be “held” two inches from your face. No matter how clear they look in your palm, put them that close and you will begin to notice individual pixels and the telling red tinge of their OLED screens. This significantly hampers the NOON’s clarity. I couldn’t, for example, distinguish the facial features of people “standing” three feet in front me. A longer draw distance does away with most of the effect, but straight lines in the distance can still wind up wibbly-wobbly. Until technology catches up to ambition, this will be unavoidable.

Still, the NOON is impressively responsive. You navigate its accompanying KOOM app, something of a library for VR content, by looking around, directing a central reticle to whatever it is you want to select. The interface is pixel-perfect accurate and remarkably snappy, “clicking” after a second or so of hovering. Even while turning as fast as my swivel chair could manage, I experienced no latency issues or screen tearing. The same was true for the star attraction, 360-degree environments. You can also tap the back of your phone to center the UI from the library or bring up the main menu (pause/play, volume, favorite, etc.) while in a simulation. It’s all incredibly easy to navigate.

But is it worth it? Is spooling up a flight through the stratosphere or over a volcano or along a rollercoaster as visceral as described? To my genuine surprise, it actually kind of is. The many 360-degree simulations available via KOOM are all pretty captivating, if occasionally smudgy. I was particularly fond of a concert in which I found myself in the middle of a circular stage and able to look around at the different musicians. I’m also still trying to find Waldo in those volcanoes I mentioned. The experience is freeing, and you can truly get a different one each time based on where you look. At the moment, this has only been applied to token and stumpy demos, but it should be just as viable in long-form simulations.

Sadly, that doesn’t apply to KOOM’s non-360-degree content, which feels more like the early days of 3D when filmmakers would have characters contrivedly toss their drink at the camera solely to justify the technology. It’s not so much VR as it is having a theater screen inside your head, which is nowhere near as cool as it sounds. The only addition it makes to conventional 3D is the formidable black void surrounding the actual content.

NOON does a lot of things right, but is still limited by its very design. VR is a young science and can only do so much. NOON trades visual fidelity for a more approachable price tag, favoring marketability over quality. Everyone has a smartphone, but not everyone has $200-400 to drop on a Rift or the like. While Camp B works on quality, Camp A stares down the equally daunting task of convincing consumers to shell out. But both camps have to worry about available content, and in this NOON makes some noteworthy strides.

Virtual reality is still an answer looking for a question, and the KOOM app raises some very good ones. It proposes a VR ecosystem wherein users can share and download VR content. I have to recommend it be limited to 360-degree content, but a VR ecosystem is actually a novel idea. My experience with the app has me excitedly mulling over the viability of VR tourism, VR nature documentaries and, most importantly, VR concerts and performances. (I’ll hopefully have a chat with NextCore about these and other ramblings very soon.)

If nothing else, NextCore has demonstrated that VR has real applications outside of gaming and whatever god awful social media spiel Facebook has in mind. But that isn’t all. The NOON is a competent but dodgy device, fairly good at what it does but handicapped by the calendar. At the moment, it’s not much more than two hours of fun and a unique thing to pull out at parties. But as it and the KOOM ecosystem gain users and content, it could very well blossom into something more substantial. Much like VR as a whole, it’s just too early to tell.