Valve announce Partnership With HTC to create a VR headset ‘Vive’
HTC and Valve have announced that they will be joining the list of companies to dabble in VR. Named the Vive, and it is for the PC.
Prior to GDC, which has recently kicked off, Valve and HTC announced that HTC will be developing a VR headset for the PC and will be released later this year, with a development kit edition this spring.
As for the specs, they certainly are bloody impressive. With 2x 1200×1080 screens, refreshing at 90fps which ‘eliminates jitters’ and achieves ‘photorealistic imagery’.
HTC say that the displays cover your entire field of vision with 360-degree views. In a press release, the company said it’s the first piece of kit to offer full room-scale experience, meaning you can walk around the room – explore your virtual surroundings:
letting you get up, walk around and explore your virtual space, inspect objects from every angle and truly interact with your surroundings.
So if I understand correctly, you can actually get up and walk around, with this thing on and it’ll be like you’re in game?
Unless I’ve had a brainfart and completely missed the idea, that’s pretty damn impressive, there’s only a couple of pitfalls with that though if this is the case, and I’m sure you can see them. (Or not, depending if you’re wearing one of these or not)
Walls.
Cables.
If it has to be tethered to be used, but you can walk around your room, how long is the cable?
In any case, let’s take a look at it!
This looks pretty cool – but it kind of reminds me of when you take a plastic cover off a gadget, and all the screw holes are showing, don’t you think?
Here it is from another angle:
Jokes aside, it seems like a pretty cool device, and I’m very interested to see more about it. Hopefully we will hear more at GDC, which is going down right now!
It’s interesting to see them pair with HTC, of all companies, I would’ve been less surprised if they paired with, say nVidia or Razer, known for their emphasis on the PC gaming space, Razer even have their own VR headset.
No doubt that this will be the front runner purely because of the partnership, which valve can easily push by a few update adverts they do, where other ones not so much, and having the ability to say ‘I’ve got the Valve VR headset’ to be honest however, I’d much rather say Oculus rift, or Razer, than HTC….. wouldn’t you?
Here’s their press conference announcement:
Interesting. Seems everyone’s going VR over the past year or two, doesn’t it?
Walk around? Screw that, I want to be lazy.
Seriously though, I feel like walking around with one of those on would make people dizzy aside from the running into things. I honestly hope its a misunderstanding as walking around wouldn’t make much sense.
That’s what I thought, I hope it’ll be like from SAO just laying or sitting
Minus the whole ‘killing-you-in-real-life-if-you-die-in-the-game’ part
Yea, that would kinda suck….
I certainly wouldn’t last long playing any of the souls games or bloodborne thats for sure!
Physically being able to move around in VR is actually a way to eliminate sickness and dizziness.
This means competitive competition, I’m sure VR tech will be more advance since competition always causes even better tech makes at a faster period of time.
definitely, it’s nice that home consoles (ps$) are getting it too, I’d like to know if it will work steam machines however, I presume it will but I’m still curious
What about virtual girls?
Sony Morpheus is 120Hz so i’d rather pick that.
me too bro 🙂
The design look so ugly
I know, they could’ve at least put something over it, which still lets signal pass through to cover it up. But this is still a developer edition, we can only hope it’s not the final product…
Great article, Minimur12! 😀
Live long and prosper!
Darth Agnon
Planeswalker and Monster Hunter
I remember playing DOOM with glasses on a gaming convention 15 years ago or so it was still with buttons to walk around and i remember it was way to hard to combine the looking around with the actual shooting, i was 13 years old then and i realised gaming for me is al about laying back and relaxing.
For exploring real areas of parts of the world i have never been thats a great subject for it.