HTC Vive today revealed the newest premium virtual reality hardware for enterprise customers, Vive Focus Plus. Vive upgraded the existing six degrees of freedom Focus headset to incorporate dual six degrees of freedom controllers, giving users the ability to seamlessly interact with their virtual environment with the same freedom as PC VR devices. This enhancement also makes porting existing PC VR content easier for developers while making it physically more portable and natural to use.
“At Vive, the announcement of Vive Focus Plus furthers our commitment to rapidly iterate and refine the VR market for both businesses and consumers. This rollout of Vive Focus Plus leads the way for deeper immersion, more realistic training and simulation, and easier porting of experiences from PC to the stand-alone category,” said HTC Vive general manager Americas Daniel O’Brien.
Blurring the lines between reality and virtual reality, Vive Focus Plus brings users greater comfort and full enterprise support. Resting easier on consumers’ heads, Vive Focus Plus offers comfort and lays the groundwork for extended sessions in VR needed by commercial customers. The headset also ships with several professional features including Kiosk Mode, Gaze Support, and device management tools to remotely enroll, monitor, and manage multiple headsets all at once. The headset will be available for purchase starting in Q2 2019 in 25 markets worldwide, supporting 19 languages. In most markets, the product will include an enterprise license for use at no additional cost.
Powered by the Vive Wave platform with content from Vive Port, subscribers will also have access to a growing library of titles on the newly announced Vive Port Infinity offering. Vive Port Infinity is the first unlimited subscription service for VR. For just one low monthly price, members can explore a wide range of games, apps, experiences, and more. In addition to Vive Focus Plus, Vive Port Infinity is compatible with high-end PC-based VR systems as well as the full spectrum of Wave supported headsets. Members will be able to use a single account across their portfolio of VR devices when the service launches on April 2nd.
Vive Focus Plus offers two ultrasonic six degrees of freedom controllers featuring an analogue trigger that gives users the ability to control objects or interactions with pressure-sensitive input, making experiences truly immersive. Additionally, with the aid of the Wave platform and SDK tools, porting from PC-based VR to Vive Focus Plus will be relatively easy for developers.
“In our dedication to occupational health and safety, we easily ported our entire Hazard Spotting range from the Vive Pro to Vive Focus Plus to facilitate our large corporation deployments. Vive Focus Plus will perfectly immerse our clients in realistic environments enabling full movement, which supports memorization of process and procedures, and improves behaviour by creating consequences to their actions. Having a professional standalone headset is very important for us to widely integrate and deploy virtual reality for workforce training at large groups, with plants all other the world, who previously saw the equipment as a barrier,” said Immersive Factory COO and founder Olivier Pierre.
Companies across the globe such as SimforHealth and Immersive Factory are already implementing Vive Focus Plus for medical training and safety simulation purposes. This all-in-one solution is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Mobile VR Platform enabling the business markets to collaborate and engage in new and effective ways.
“With HTC’s Vive Focus Plus providing a high-end processor and 3K AMOLED display, we are able to create realistic and immersive 3D environments for our medical and nursing simulators, providing better training outcomes for HCPs without wires or connected computers. Moreover, the six degrees of freedom controllers have improved the way to perform specific medical interactions that were not possible with the regular three degrees of freedom controllers. Now, Simforhealth’s simulators have a better, more comfortable user experience,” said SimforHealth CTO Olivier Gardinetti.
Vive will be showcasing the newest standalone headset, Vive Focus Plus and the new Vive Pro Eye, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, next week. The company will be spotlighting innovative partner experiences like construction safety and hazard training, medical simulation for nurses and their own multi-user collaboration tool, Vive Sync, in addition to groundbreaking demos on the future of VR and 5G.
