Vive has seemed to be devoting a lot of attention to the enterprise, but the company teased their new consumer VR headset called the Vive Cosmos at CES today. The positionally-tracked headset boasts tracked hand controllers and can be interestingly be powered by either a phone or PC, making it the first in a new class of hybrid VR headsets.
The consumer market is going to be a tough one for HTC to hold onto. The company’s original HTC Vive garnered a lot of early excitement, but a series of aggressive price cuts from Facebook’s Oculus forced the company into a rough spot trying to find hardware margins in the less price-sensitive enterprise market. The company can’t really compete on the same playing field as Oculus as Facebook ships hardware at seemingly break-even prices, HTC’s move seems to therefore sell products that Facebook wouldn’t make in the first place.
What’s interesting is that HTC is relying on embedded inside-out tracking technology for this device, essentially removing SteamVR — Valve’s highly-accurate tracking tech — from the equation. This could be a big risk to HTC, as their main consumer market seems to be those looking to push high-end experiences and the alignment with Valve and SteamVR has been a big selling point there. The Vive Cosmos will run HTC’s new ViveRS operating system.
What’s really going to matter is implementation and what kind of experiences are available for phone-powered users. If the company can eek out performance that enables headset and controller positionally-tracked experiences on a phone-powered device, they’d have something that could potentially be an interesting challenger to the $399 Oculus Quest, though it would assumedly operate at a much higher price point.
There’s still a lot we don’t know like specs, price or release date. More info will be available “in the coming months” according to the company.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Rb768p
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