Review: Lenovo Mirage Solo With Daydream

Cordless VR is charging full-steam into your living room. Just days ago, we greeted the Oculus Go, a $200 standalone headset that doesn't require a computer and isn't encumbered by cables. Now, we celebrate the arrival of the Lenovo Mirage Solo, a $400 standalone headset powered by Google's Daydream VR platform. Lenovo's headset is also cable-free, and while all of the other Daydream products we've seen so far require a phone for visuals, this one doesn't ask you to provide any additional hardware. All the guts are in the headset.

There's a big price difference—the Oculus Go is $200, and the Lenovo Mirage Solo is $400. For many people, that giant gap makes the decision about which one to buy blindingly obvious. But the machines each run on unique platforms and have unique capabilities, and those are the differences that end up mattering more than price.

The Mirage Solo runs on Daydream, which was designed for mobile phones and has around 350 games and experiences on offer. That's less impressive than the 1,000 games and experiences Facebook lists in the Oculus store. Facebook is also investing heavily in social interaction inside VR , enabling you to strap on an Oculus headset and watch sports, live concerts, or Harold & Kumar movies together with your pals in a virtual living room.

But the feature that gives the Mirage Solo the edge—not only over the Oculus Go but other Daydream headsets—is the "six degrees of freedom" it offers. This is VR-speak for the capability of a headset to not only track your head's rotation, but also its physical position in the virtual world. With six degrees of freedom, you can peek around corners, peer over ledges, and lurch sideways to duck a snowball flying at your face. By contrast, Oculus Go, Samsung's Gear VR, and Google Daydream View headset all offer three degrees of freedom—the rotational axes, but not the positional ones.

There are pricer options—HTC Vive, Oculus Rift—that offer six degrees of freedom, but again, you have to plug those headsets into a computer. There are more standalone 6DOF headsets coming soon too. HTC's Vive Focus standalone is expected to come stateside from China later this year, and Oculus will likely have its own 6DOF standalone headset (currently codenamed "Santa Cruz") next year. More Daydream-powered 6DOF goggles are surely on their way as well.

For now though, the Mirage Solo is the first headset to offer VR with six degrees of freedom without satellite devices or sensors. It's the one product on the market delivering VR's cordless, fully immersive future right here and right now. That's the real value proposition.

The Mirage earns its immersive mojo via a Google technology called WorldSense. Those two lenses that resemble eyes on the front of the headset—those are scanning your surroundings as you play. If you move to another spot in your home, you can recenter the headset by holding down a button on the Daydream controller.

Google's tech is impressive, and delivers on the company's promise of smart positioning and immersive gameplay. But of course, the platform is only good as the stuff you can do with it. Google's app store has some fun experiences that take advantage of the WorldSense tracking: Merry Snowballs, the Blade Runner: Revelations first-person POV puzzle-solver, and the truly bizarre and psychedelic Virtual Virtual Reality. Beyond a dozen or so premiere titles, the quality starts to roll downhill. There are also social apps like Altspace, though nothing as broad as Facebook Spaces. But since Google is dumping resources into Daydream—and we'll likely get some more VR news at Google's upcoming I/O developer conference—I would expect the volume and quality of the games and experiences to continue to grow. And there's still plenty of fun stuff to play right now.

Inside the headgear is a Snapdragon 835 processor, the same mobile chip that powers the current crop of high-end smartphones. The headset has a 4,000 mAh battery that lasts six or seven hours and recharges over USB-C. The screen is a 5.5-inch display with a pixel resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 and a decent 75Hz refresh rate—almost exactly the same as the Go's screen specs. The 64 GB of onboard storage is supplemented by a Micro SD slot. For audio, you can plug in any set of headphones or use the appropriately short-corded buds in the box. Basically, there's a solidly powerful Android phone inside the thing.

To affix it to your skull, twist the knob at the rear of the big padded ring until the clamping force is pleasantly snug. It fastens just like the HTC Vive Pro (or a bike helmet). Additionally, a padded plate presses against your forehead to stabilize the 1.5-pound rig and to take some pressure off your cheekbones and nose. The initial setup has you connect the headset to your home Wi-Fi network. You really have not lived until you've used a Daydream remote's ghostly pointer to enter a network password on a giant, floating VR keyboard.

That's all there really is to it. It's very easy to get the hang of things inside Daydream's virtual worlds, and the games are all easy to pilot with the simple controller. The menus look and feel like Android's menus and match exactly what you see today in a Daydream headset, which makes things refreshingly familiar. You'll need a Google ID to download and buy games and experiences, and there's really something for everyone in the Daydream store. Castle-defense games, board games, family-friendly stuff—almost all of it on the cute end, but all of it infinitely playable in VR. At least for 20 or 30 minutes, at which point you'll need to give your vestibular system a break. You don't want to get vomit in the USB-C ports.