HTC revealed details of the lightweight standalone Vive headset it has been teasing for months.
The company was teasing a new headset in cryptic tweets for over two months with captions such as “go small or go home”, and already hinted it will be sold to consumers. Last month YouTuber SadlyItsBradley shared renders of it based on images of it leaked to him.
HTC has now sent The Verge an official render of the front of the visor, and detailed some of the headset’s features.
HTC claims the headset, as yet unnamed, will have two hours of battery life, won’t require a PC or phone, and will support tracked controllers and hand tracking. Like Quest and Pico headsets, it will optionally connect to a gaming PC to stream PC VR games via a cable or Wi-Fi.
Like Quest Pro it features four black & white tracking cameras and a central RGB camera for color passthrough and mixed reality. But HTC is claiming some notable improvements over Quest Pro. The dynamic range of the cameras is apparently sufficient to read a phone or laptop screen. It also features a depth sensor, which was dropped from Quest Pro in the months before it launched. This should enable at least some automatic room scanning, while on Quest Pro you have to manually mark out your furniture.
HTC claims the headset will be “one of the lightest that’s on the market”, but didn’t reveal the exact weight. It also didn’t reveal an exact price but hinted it will be expensive compared to headsets like Quest 2 and Pico 4. “We’re in an era when consumer VR headsets have been massively subsidized by companies that are trying to vacuum up and take personal data to provide to advertisers,” HTC’s Shen Ye said. “We don’t believe the way that we want to approach it is to compromise on privacy.”
Specific details will be revealed at CES on January 5th, where the headset will be formally announced.
