Acer releases cut-price HoloLens alternative to developers - available for just $300

If it's anything like Acer's laptops it will work for a couple of years and then fall apart

Acer has started selling its "mixed reality" headset to developers via the Microsoft Store at a tenth of the price of Microsoft's own HoloLens.

The headset we tested in prototype last month is available to anyone looking to build content for it for just $300 a unit. It had been made available in private beta to some developers back in April, but now it's been made more broadly available.

It's the first of four companies' products to come from a partnership with Microsoft to build mixed reality devices for the Creators' Update to Windows 10.

HP's is also on the way, but Acer has been quicker off the mark with a competitively priced realisation of Windows Holographic, the part of Windows that Hololens will also run on once it arrives.

However, while Microsoft's headset costs $3,000, Acer's is just $300.

The demo we were given concentrated on how the virtual and physical worlds could interact, and although it was clunky, it allowed for everything from 360-degree movies to placing objects into our "real" environment from a library.

Paint 3D has been added specifically for the purpose of merging the two worlds, andyou will soon be able to appear in the same virtual ‘holodeck' as your Skype app.

There is a catch, which is there's a ruddy great cable attached to your PC, but the specs are still impressive.

It has a refresh rate of up to 90Hz (compare that to 50Hz for a standard UK TV picture), it has an HDMI 2.0, USB 3.1A, Headphone jack, Mic jack, Displayport 1.2 and comes with a four metre cable that combines the HDMI to the USB-C.

If you want one, though, you'll need a seriously high-end PC. For starters, it'll need to be something bearing an Intel Core i7 with at least six cores or an octa-core AMD Ryzen 7.

It'll also need to pack a heavyweight graphics card, such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, or better. And you'll need at least 16GB of RAM and 10GB of storage.

And if that wasn't enough, the headset will require the PC to have an HDMI in of either 1.4 (which will give you 60Hz refresh) or 2.0 (90Hz). A Displayport 1.2 will do instead, with some adapters.

You will need a USB-C port with USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A (which thankfully is all USB-C ports), Bluetooth 4.0+. And you'll need to be running the latest Developer Mode edition of Windows 10 Creators' Update.

If you've got all that, then you're set.