YouTuber SadlyItsBradley (Brad Lynch) shared renders of a new HTC Vive headset based on images leaked to him.
HTC has been teasing a new headset in a series of cryptic tweets for over a month now with captions such as “go small or go home”, and hinted it will be sold to consumers. HTC Vive’s Twitter bio was recently changed to “Be a part of the next step in premium VR.”
Lynch said the images leaked to him were black & white, but sharing them would reveal the source. So as he did when images of Quest Pro were leaked to him back in April, he again worked with product designer Marcus Kane to produce a detailed 3D model for renders.
The renders show a headset resembling the existing Vive Flow, but with rear padding and a total of five cameras: four on the edges of the front and the sides, likely for tracking, and one in the center, likely for color passthrough. This configuration is similar to Pico 4 and Quest Pro.
This new headset will apparently include the same tracked controllers as Vive Focus 3. The existing Vive Flow uses your phone or a sold-separately controller as an untracked rotational laser pointer, suggesting this new headset will be more gaming focused.
Its purported unique feature is its modular design. The rear padding, containing the battery can apparently detach so you can use it in “glasses mode”, powered by an external USB power source or acting as a PC VR headset. This would make it suitable for media watching in bed or lying back on a couch.
The lenses look to be the same pancake optics used in Vive Flow, which we noted had a slightly smaller field of view than Quest 2. But Lynch said the LCD panel resolution has been increased to 1920×1920 per eye. That’s higher than any Meta headset but lower than Vive Focus 3, Vive Pro 2, and Pico 4.
Lynch said “many” sources told him the headset will release early next year and feature a chip “much more powerful” than the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 used in Quest 2 and Pico 4. Could HTC launch the first headset with the yet-to-be-announced XR2 Gen 2? If so, it could have a GPU twice as powerful.
UPDATE: Lynch now says this was mistaken, and the device will use the same Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chip featured in Quest 2 and Pico 4.
Lynch also said multiple sources suggested it will be priced less than $1000, but later Tweeted this was incorrect.
