Valve’s “Vive” aims to one-up the competition by coming packaged with special VR controllers, and VR base stations that track your physical location.
Earlier in the month, Valve teased its new upcoming VR headset, and now it looks like collaborator HTC has jumped the gun by announcing the “Vive”. Unlike the Oculus Rift, which hasn’t given a solid consumer release date, HTC claims that the Vive will be available to consumers later this year, with a developer edition coming out this spring. Check out the announcement video to the right.
In addition to the standard gyrosensor, accelerometer, and laser position sensor that most other VR headsets use to track a user’s position, the Vive will also feature something called the Steam VR base station, which will let you walk around a virtual space instead of using a controller. A pair of the base stations come packaged with the device, and when set up can “track your physical location … in spaces up to 15 feet by 15 feet.”
The Vive will also be packaged with a pair of HTC-made wireless controllers for manipulating objects or shooting weapons through hand tracking. They’re “designed to be so versatile that they will work with a wide range of VR experiences.”
“We believe that virtual reality will totally transform the way that we interact with the world. Virtual reality will become a mainstream technology for the rest of the world,” said HTC’s Peter Chou. The company added in a press release that the Vive will be the first device to offer a “full room-scale” experience, “letting you get up, walk around and explore your virtual space, inspect objects from every angle and truly interact with your surroundings.”
We’ll no doubt hear more about the Vive at next week’s Game Developer’s Conference, where Valve stated it would be made available for attendees to try for themselves.
