Alienware’s Mobile VR Backpack The Future Of PC Gaming?

Earlier this week at E3 the folks over at Alienware showed off an early design of their portable VR-ready PC that is built into a fairly slick-looking backpack. Legit Reviews got a chance to see it in the booth on the show floor and it looks pretty good. Alienware is one of a handful of companies that is exploring backpack PCs for the wearable VR computer market. Having full range of motion while using a VR headset would certainly be cool and improve the VR experience.

Alienware calls this Free Roam VR for a tetherless VR experience. Right now both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive need to be connected by both USB and HDMI to a fairly powerful computer and that obviously severely hinders ones mobility. Alienware didn’t give us all the details as to the hardware inside their tether problem solver, but did say that it was powered by the new AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card. The AMD Radeon RX 480 is priced at $199 for the 4GB version and is said to be powerful enough to power a full-fledged VR PC. It will likely also be a hit for augmented reality fans as well.

Right now one of the things Alienware is working on is cooling and ventilation as they have stuffed a ton of hardware inside a pretty small enclosure. If they are concerned about heat and cooling it makes us wonder how long the battery will last in rather small backpack. How long can you play a VR game title before the battery runs our of power? The AMD Radeon RX 480 ‘Polaris’ video card is designed for the desktop and likely has around a 150W TPD by itself, so details on the weight, price and battery life will be interesting to learn.

We noticed that Alienware is looking for freeback from gamers on the VR Backpack concept, so feel free to let them know what you think of VR Free Roam here. We can’t wait to see what LAN parties of the future will look like if these take off as a room of hundreds of people in VR wondering around a warehouse or huge open venue would be fun to watch!