HTC is going global with their Vive Focus VR headsets. The product was released only to the Chinese market, and there were no official announcements on any international release. On 21st March 2018, HTC announced at the GDC 2018 that the Vive Focus would be definitely hitting the international markets this year.
The HTC Vive retails at $680 for the electric blue version and $632 for the Almond white version. HTC has made it possible for developers around the world to order preview version of their Focus headsets through HTC’s official Portal. With Such a move, HTC plans to have the developers on board for the development of the headset. Since HTC doesn’t use Google Play for content distribution, HTC will need all the attention it can get from developers.
HTC has played it very strategically as they also made an announcement that the developers will have 100% of the revenue share from their titles on Viveport between the months of April and September 2018.
The Vive Focus has an inbuilt Snapdragon 835 processor that takes care of all the image and data processing.
This time HTC has truly decided to rely on its VIVEPORT platform rather than the Google Play for content distribution. Besides the elimination of a third device, one of the other best features of the Vive Focus is that it offers a six degrees of freedom (up, down, left, right, forward and backward), which will give you the feel of being inside an entirely different world. The Vive Focus has built-in sensors which solves the problem of stumbling over things or bumping into walls/people, encounter while using the other headsets.
Besides the Snapdragon 835, some of the other special features of the Vive Focus are a 2,880 x 1,600 resolution AMOLED screen, built-in speakers and microphone, a 3.5mm audio jack, a micros SD card slot, which supports storage up to 2 TB, wireless AC connectivity, and rechargeable battery.
The Vive Focus is the third standalone VR headset launched this year in China. Some of the other products in competition to the Vive focus will be the Oculus Go, which is also a phone free set, expected to be launched in the month of May.
And, another device is the Mirage Solo, which is developed by Lenovo in partnership with Google. The date of launch of Mirage Solo is not yet fixed, but one thing we do know is that it runs on the Daydream VR ecosystem of Google. Above all this, the most attractive will be the launch of Qualcomm’s new VR kit which will come with a Snapdragon 845 processor, built-in eye tracking and Vive Wave SDK for creating applications.
One of the biggest advantages of HTC Vive Focus is that it has sensors that scan the room for obstacles. So you can wander around with the HTC Vive without having the worry of stumbling over something.
With the announcement of the official release, the Vive Focus is certainly going to rattle some cages in the VR industry.