More info (HTC partners with Bandai Namco) More info (Full teaser video of the new Vive Focus with 3 points of view) And a clear answer to Facebook’s philosophy of abandoning the old headsets. Also considering that HTC Vive owners usually are makers, they would love the possibility to repair the device by themselves. So it has partnered with iFixit, which will provide detailed DIY repair guides for the headsets and the controllers, so people with a broken Vive can repair the headsets by themselves and keep happily using them without having to contact HTC assistance (that anyway in the West was not famous for its quality). The original HTC Vive is still the most used Vive headset on Steam, so of course, HTC still has to care about its users, but at the same time, it has no sense for it to spend lots of money for the assistance on an old device. The other one is with iFixit, to provide spare parts and DIY repair guides for the old Vive headsets.
We don’t know exactly what it does mean, but considering the quality of Bandai Namco content, we can hope for some VR experiences that will make all anime and manga fans happy. In the meantime, HTC has announced two important partnerships: one is with the Japanese company Bandai Namco, to bring anime content on Viveport. We have to wait for the Vivecon, or the Chinese-counterpart V2EC event, to discover more. From these teasers, it is clear that the headset has a slick design, it has 4 tracking cameras, and what appears to be a big vent to dissipate the heat. Then, the company started sharing a single teaser GIF of the device, but Andrew Jakobs has discovered that just by changing the final number of the URL on the GIF, it was possible to get other 2 GIFs, so now we have three points of view of the upcoming headset.
May there be a Pro and Light version? A PC and standalone version? A VR and an MR version? We don’t know, but this looks interesting. First of all, HTC talks about “headsets” (plural), and this is quite suspicious. We have little new info on what is going to be announced.
So, please, HTC, don’t mess this time and don’t showcase your headset on a spinning head.
If this headset won’t be good, probably it will lose definitely the trust of the XR community. Considering the mediocre success of the Vive Cosmos and the Vive Focus Plus, I think that HTC can’t afford to make an error this time. HTC has said this headset will be amazing, so everyone is hoping for this to be true, even if we all know that the price will be high. Or better, maybe it’s not totally merit of HTC, it is mostly the fact that everyone is hoping for a good headset that can compete somehow with the Oculus Quest, even just in the prosumer segment. People are very curious about what it is going to launch in around 8 days at the VIVECON event, and the hopes are high. Top news of the week (Image by HTC Vive) HTC rises the hype for the launch of its new headsetįor once, HTC seems to have organized the pre-launch of its new upcoming headset fairly well.