After Oculus started its pre-orders last week at CES 2016, HTC CEO Cher Wang has revealed that the HTC Vive VR head-mounted display will be available for preorder starting 29 February.
Wang in an interview with The Telegraph, said HTC is now emphasising on virtual reality headsets rather than focus majorly on its smartphone business. With the release of Vive, the compay will have taken a major step in that direction.
Vive is a co-production between HTC and Valve, with the work on it starting as back as 2013. This will be the second big VR headset in the list of other big VR headsets from big corporations to hit the market after Facebook’s Oculus which will start shipping in March.
Final specifications for Vive are not out yet, but they will be on par with Rift if not higher. Dual OLED displays at or around a combined resolution of 2160×1200 with a 90Hz refresh rate, united with its virtual reality hand controllers, is something HTC will ship when Vive is out. Apart from this, Vive will also have ‘base stations’ which will interact with the headset to provide room-scale virtual reality to interact with an environment and increase the immersiveness. But HTC has is still keeping its cards close to its chest.
There were a lot of complains from early adopters of VR who were expecting Oculus to be priced much lower than its $599 price tag after Palmer Luckey, the Oculus inventor had said it will be in the $399 segment. But since, Vive is going to bundle the extra camera, base stations, hand controllers along with the headsets, the price is likely to be much more steeper than Oculus Rift.
With the collaboration with Valve, HTC’s Vive will have a marketplace SteamVR to explore the VR content right from when the shipment of the product starts. Oculus on the other hand is developing Oculus Home, a marketplace for its content.