HTC Vive Is Launching Its Own Quest 2 VR Competitor at CES
Here comes the rise of the stand-alone VR headsets.
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HTC's next headset looks to follow a similar playbook to Meta and Pico.
The Meta Quest 2 enjoyed a unique situation for the last few years as one of the best stand-alone VR headsets you could buy -- and, one of the only ones. Competitors seem to be coming now, and HTC's latest Vive headset being announced at Las Vegas' CES show in January is another sign of what to expect in 2023.
HTC's self-contained pair of VR goggles was teased to The Verge, and the device looks to follow a similar path to where the Pico 4, Meta's Quest Pro and upcoming Quest 3, and possibly Apple's expected headset are aiming. HTC started to play with compact consumer VR again with its phone-connected Vive Flow goggles, but this new device looks to be more powerful and also have color passthrough cameras that should enable mixed reality.
The teased image of the headset looks to be more compact than headsets like the Quest 2 (or even the Pico 4), resembling a design closer to the Meta Quest Pro. It's likely to have "pancake" optics that can compress the display area, something the Quest Pro and Pico 4 both have.
HTC's global Head of Product Shen Ye confirmed to The Verge that the device will have the sort of six-degree full-motion controllers that the Vive Focus 3, Quest 2, Pico 4, and almost all modern VR headsets have. Fitness will be one of the uses HTC sees with the headset, similar to how the Quest 2 and Pico 4 work. HTC could experiment with body tracking, considering the company has already deployed its own Vive Trackers with PC-connected VR for years, and even has its own wrist-based tracking accessories. Eye tracking, however, looks like it'll possibly not be included (adding eye tracking tends to bump up VR headset price). Ye confirmed a two-hour battery life, similar to existing headsets.
Chipmaker Qualcomm, whose processors power nearly every mainstream VR and AR headset, have already indicated for years that a wave of stand-alone devices would be coming from a variety of global partners. The big challenge hasn't been hardware, it's been software, ecosystem, and price. HTC has to figure out how to make that happen better than Meta, and in a year where Apple looks to be looming with its own device — and who knows who else. We'll know more in Las Vegas when we head to CES this January.
CNET has reached out to HTC for comment on this breaking story.