The day of HTC Vive has arrived, since Valve has enabled the option to request a developer unit through Steam. This Developer Edition will be free and its delivery is subject to Valve’s approval.
The request can be made through this contact form, in which we must enter a brief description of our virtual reality project, the size of our development team and the estimated release date of the game or experience. The kit contains an HTC Vive viewer, two hand controllers and two Lighthouse absolute positioning stations. Although the quantities will be limited, Valve intends to support as many developers as possible, and the units will start shipping at the end of spring, a process that will continue throughout the summer. On the SteamVR page, we can see that Valve confirms again that the commercial version of the HTC Vive will be released by the end of the year.
Valve has also created the SteamVR Developer Community, designed for those who own an HTC Vive Developer Edition. Although its contents will be public and everyone will be able to follow the discussions, only the developers will have permission to write in this forum.