While the past weeks have been all about the VR hype with the Oculus Rift preorders coming online, the HTC Vive was nearly forgotten in the absence of news; however, the HTC Vive was a little late for a good reason, it would seem, because it just came out into the daylight with a huge series of good and surprising news.
While in essence, the HTC Vive is pretty much the same thing as the Oculus Rift, and more specifically a virtual reality headset that promises to host the upcoming advancement of VR technology applications, there seem to be some differences. At least in what the bundle purchase and included items are concerned.
Firstly, the HTC Viva was announced to come with two handheld controllers over the Oculus Rift’s included Xbox controller. The two, separate controllers have inbuilt motion sensors that will allow the user’s movements to be tracked across a room and mimic them in the virtual reality experience. This will be the kind of feature that allows for a much higher level of immersion in future games coming out for the virtual reality platform, for example.
And while we’re on the topic of immersion, it seems that HTC has put a few extra ounces of effort in raising its bar as high as possible. The HTC Vive adopts a design that is slightly different from what we had originally seen in the pictures and on displays. Apparently, the upgraded model also includes a brighter display that was made to provide its users an even deeper sense of immersion.
The HTC Vive demonstrates the ability to combine both realities without losing touch of either.
But HTC seems to be tame and thoughtful when it comes to the long-term effects of being completely immersed in a virtual reality game or experience. The headset includes a front-facing camera that will allow you to see the outside world on the account of a switch if you want to take a break from using the gear. The company itself stated that this addition “demonstrates the ability to combine both realities without losing touch of either”.
This could also hold some valuable implications in what augmented reality is concerned too as it will open up some gates for smaller scale of virtual reality applications – with some utility found in things such as engineering, construction and so on.
However, the HTC Vive has also just announced its price and it would seem that the extra additions will have their fans whipping out their wallets for the sum of $799, $200 more than its direct competitor, the Oculus Rift, will cost. Not to mention that in order to be able to run the HTC Vive, you’ll have to make sure that your computer is performant enough to run VR applications to begin with.
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Deborah Campbell
