The Taiwanese company is preparing to launch two new VR viewers for this year, as well as a subscription to Viveport without monthly limits.
The press conference of HTC on the occasion of the CES has left us the announcement of virtual reality viewers Live Eye and Live Cosmos, in addition to other news related to its content store Viveport and its new ecosystem Vive Reality. The company has not shared the specifications of these viewers, just some details that we offer below along with the rest of the ads they have made.
Live Eye
The new HTC viewer for professionals maintains the design of Vive Pro with the addition of integrated eye tracking, which allows you to improve performance by foveated rendering, as well as use the data in the look to control applications or track and analyze them. HTC showed in the presentation the Major League Baseball app with eye tracking support, allowing users to control menus without using a traditional controller.
“It is aimed at the enterprise market where eye tracking has a number of immediate benefits: from performance, accessibility and improvements to training applications. It will also benefit developers by minimizing the resources needed to render high-end VR environments,” they comment.
Vive Pro Eye will be available in the second quarter, which might suggest a date similar to Vive Pro, which arrived in April last year. At the moment there is no more information about its price and features, so we do not know if it improves on issues such as resolution and viewing angle, although they hope to share more news this week.
Live Cosmos
The second viewer presented has been designed with the focus on comfort and accessibility, hence they bet on the absolute inside-out positioning via 4 cameras (two on the front and one on each side) and a headband-type fastening reminiscent of the Sony viewfinder. Vive Cosmos will include motion controllers and can be used with a PC and mobile phonemaking it easy to use anywhere.
“Without the need for external base stations, Vive Cosmos maximizes the flexibility of the space of use, whether at home or on the go, and has the ability to work with more than a traditional gaming PC. We found that over 85% of VR users believe that ease of use and configuration is the most important factor to consider when purchasing a viewer. We believe Cosmos will make VR more accessible to those who have not invested in it before and will also be a superior experience for VR enthusiasts,” they say.
As we can see in the previous video, the front of the viewer can be moved to be able to see the real world without having to take the device out of your head. Cosmos will be the first viewer of the company to use the Vive Reality system, which we will talk about in the next section, although it basically consists of a new way of interacting with the contents.
As with Vive Pro Eye, we have no information about their price or features, as they hope to share all of this later, although they have announced that they will offer developer kits earlier this year and that the consumer version will also arrive this year. However, on the device’s website they indicate that they will your sharpest screens to date, as they will have RGB matrix for minimum screendoorin addition to can be customized in a modular way. “The virtual universe is always expanding; Vive Cosmos was designed to expand with it. With a growing set of modular customizations, the possibilities of VR are endless,” they share. One of these modular additions could be the headphones, as they will be sold separately, being similar in the way of coupling them to the Mantis VR of PSVR.
Live Reality System
A new way of experiencing virtual worlds that spans from the moment the user places the viewer to the way they interact with the content. The system has been designed by HTC’s Creative Labs team, and includes the possibility to dive into Origin to share experiences and access other worlds (applications or toolboxes) through what they call “lenses”.
“Our philosophy has always been focused on developing great products and experiences that create a natural and effortless bridge between the real world and the virtual world, and with Vive Reality System we set out to reimagine Vive’s core software experience to meet these needs. The tools and environments that make up Vive Reality System aim to make spatial computing accessible to everyone, wherever their journey to immersive worlds takes them. We want VR to feel less like just launching apps and more like getting into other worlds, ” they say.
As part of the initiative, they have announced a partnership with Mozilla to make Firefox Reality Vive’s first dedicated browser.
Viveport Infinity
The evolution of the subscription system of Viveport that will allow us to access at any time to all the contents that are part of the service (they speak of more than 500), thus eliminating the restriction of the five contents per month that we currently have.
“When we first launched our Subscription service, we gave consumers the ability to try out 5 titles a month. Now, with Viveport Infinity, we offer our members the best value in VR content with 100x more options, all at a low price, ” they say.
The new service will be available on April 5, coinciding with the third anniversary of Vive, and will be available with all Vive viewers, those compatible with the Vive Wave platform and the Oculus Rift viewer.
Finally, they have announced that the content store Viveport, which has almost tripled the number of users and content since January last year, will receive a new section that will host 2D and 3D video content.
