HTC Announces Vive Wave Open Mobile VR Platform, Vive Focus HMD
- by Fred Ferguson
- in Technology
- — Nov 14, 2017
HTC has announced Vive Focus, a standalone virtual reality headset that eliminates the wires found on the regular HTC Vive. The company hopes that Vive Wave will "bring together the highly fragmented mobile VR market" by make device optimisation and content creation easier for third-party developers. It doesn't appear HTC has mentioned any pricing at this time, though the company does say that more than 100 developers are now working on content for Focus.
Twelve Chinese hardware partners have already signed on to provide support for Vive Wave, featuring names such as 360QIKU, Coocaa, Thundercomm, Idealens, Nubia, Pimax and Pico, many of which have produced their own VR hardware, such as Pico and Pimax. With the Vive Wave SDK, vendors can integrate accessories - be it a Leap Motion, gloves or even outside-in solutions for 6DoF input (and potentially eye-tracking solutions to ease up rendering resources).
With China's VR market booming, the number of companies selling VR headsets, particularly for mobile, is also growing. Content from Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR is also said to arrive on Vive Wave soon.
The Vive Focus itself is created to be a lightweight, easily portable VR option. It runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip and uses inside-out positional tracking. Choice is great, of course, but when each device has its own content platform, it's hard for developers to support all systems, paving the way for one platform to dominate. HTC hasn't given a lot more away about the Focus' other specs, like its screen resolution. One such example is a VR game called Spark of Light which, according to its developer, only took three hours to port the original Vive version to Vive Wave. The focus appears to be exclusively on China with this release as well.
Roughly one year and a half after the general release of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and a full half-decade behind the latter's Kickstarter campaign outset, so-called "all-in-one" VR headsets are finally (almost) ready for primetime.
Richard's love for gadgets was probably triggered by an electric shock at the age of five while poking his finger into power sockets for no reason.
