HTC Announces two new VR headsets, "Vive Cosmos" and "Vive pro eye"

[GoldenSound]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/htc-announces-vive-pro-eye-a-new-vr-headset-with-built-in-eye-tracking/
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172740/htc-vive-cosmos-vr-headset-announce-ces-2019

Quote

HTC kicked off its CES 2019 presence with two significant product reveals: the HTC Vive Pro Eye (which is a new virtual reality headset for PCs) and the HTC Cosmos (which is an untethered VR headset that will work with smartphones or PCs).

-ArsTechnica

First is the "Vive Pro Eye" Which is identical to the existing vive-pro, but includes eye tracking and integrated foveated rendering.

 

Second is the "Vive Cosmos" which is intended to be used wirelessly, powered by a PC. It is NOT a standalone unit and so seemingly is not intended to be an oculus quest competitor.
However HTC did suggest that in future you may be able to use it with a smartphone, eliminating the need for a PC.

 

Release dates or estimates were not announced for the Cosmos. The HTC Vive Pro Eye is slated for launch in the "second quarter of 2019." No pricing information as of yet

[mxk]

Interesting, isn't VR kinda dead? Maybe a good price point will encourage consumers.

[Happycowdance]

is that rgb on the vive cosmos controllers? 

 

[GoldenSound]

Just now, mxk. said:

Interesting, isn't VR kinda dead? Maybe a good price point will encourage consumers.

I think luke said it best in the latest WAN show.
VR isn't dead. Its growing, and its good.
Its just not exploded like many people and companies thought it was going to. Back when everything was being marketed toward VR and everyone was trying to jump on the hype train.

I mean, there is still measureable growth, and there are new products such as this coming out.
https://www.vrfocus.com/2018/12/vr-industry-sees-positive-growth-as-q3-headset-sales-hit-1-9-million/

I think stuff like quest (and hopefully cosmos if they price it right) are going to be really good for general adoption.

The problem with current gen VR like the vive and oculus is that whilst they ARE really good. You have to have a very beefy PC, a fairly large space to use it, and its very expensive.

With stuff like the oculus quest, you just get it, and go. Wherever you like. And its at a price that is affordable to many people. So I personally feel that affordable products like that will be a strong force of growth. But only time will tell!

[porina]

2 minutes ago, mxk. said:

Interesting, isn't VR kinda dead? Maybe a good price point will encourage consumers.

There's enough room for both high end and mass market systems. This Vive Pro Eye is for those on the high end. The masses have PSVR and mobile based solutions.

 

I have original Vive, and while I like more, don't think I'd want to pay for it again. 

[GoldenSound]

3 minutes ago, Happycowdance said:

is that rgb on the vive cosmos controllers? 

 

The vive cosmos is using optical tracking (similar to the PSVR tracking) which is lower cost than methods such as what the oculus quest is using, but normally poorer quality (that doesn't mean its bad though!).

Essentially rather than tracking the IR constellations in the controllers like in the quest, the cameras on the HMD use software to keep track of the illuminated patterns on the controllers. Hence the abstract design, as that makes it easier for computer vision to keep accurate tracking.

[mxk]

1 minute ago, GoldenOne said:

snip

I'll definitely keep an eye on this; it seems to me like HTC is going in the right direction.

[poochyena]

Huh, I was under the impression that HTC was no longer working on new headsets and Valve was going to make them themselves.

[GoldenSound]

Just now, mxk. said:

I'll definitely keep an eye on this; it seems to me like HTC is going in the right direction.

I hope so!

I think the standalone stuff is good no matter what.

My main concern is with the vive pro eye. 

a) if they have re-used the same awful lenses, that would kill it for me. I was really surprised they re-used the original vive lenses in the vive pro. If they do it again when this product CLEARLY has a focus on foveated rendering I will be pretty shocked.

b) I hope they price it right. Otherwise oculus will be laughing. I want there to be more competition. Right now the % market share of oculus is growing fast, mainly due to the extremely competitive pricing compared to vive. And if they have no competition in that price range then there is less drive for innovation

[GoldenSound]

4 minutes ago, poochyena said:

Huh, I was under the impression that HTC was no longer working on new headsets and Valve was going to make them themselves.

Valve is making their own headset under the steam hardware brand
https://uploadvr.com/valve-135-vr-headset-half-life/

They partnered with HTC for the original vive. But SteamVR is supported on basically all headsets so there is no need for that partnership to continue for the vive to "work".
So it would seem that HTC and Valve will both be making headsets independant of eachother. But hey! Competition is always good for us end consumers

[Nowak]

I'm still under the idea that VR can work really well in education. Better than in gaming, even. Glad to see that HTC hasn't given up on the Vive brand.

[TetraSky]

.. Identical to the current vive? It says the specs are unknown in the first article. You mean the look?

But why couldn't they make it wireless? Don't they have an adapter for the original Vive that does this already?
Not only that, but if it'd make it too heavy, why not make the headset lighter by sending the extra weight to our shoulders/backpack/vest/belt?

Overall, I fully expect this to cost more than the current vive, meaning way out of my budget range.

[Thaldor]

3 minutes ago, GoldenOne said:

My main concern is with the vive pro eye. 

a) if they have re-used the same awful lenses, that would kill it for me. I was really surprised they re-used the original vive lenses in the vive pro. If they do it again when this product CLEARLY has a focus on foveated rendering I will be pretty shocked.

The Vive lenses are heavily optimised for direct forward looking (that's why the IPD adjustment is very important) and if the eye tracking is what I hope/think it is, they will need to use lenses that allow you to look everywhere. But I can be as much wrong as I can be right.

Quote

b) I hope they price it right. Otherwise oculus will be laughing. I want there to be more competition. Right now the % market share of oculus is growing fast, mainly due to the extremely competitive pricing compared to vive. And if they have no competition in that price range then there is less drive for innovation

The price difference has always been there and sadly with the high-end HMDs it has been twisted quite a lot. Like my friend was very fired up when he got Rift so much cheaper than I got my Vive and then the truth raised it's ugly head, no room-scale tracking and at the time no controllers and with those he actually ended up paying more. And now there's marketing going very badly against HTC, Oculus basicly bringing new HMDs out and leaving the Rift to be the "high-end" and going all in with cheaper headsets while HTC is leaving Vive to be the "middle-ground" and only bringing one "low-end" cheaper HMD and new "highest-end" HMD.

 

I would guess VIve Pro Eye will be more expensive as Vive Pro, but as it has been said quite many times even the Vive Pro isn't really aimed at the consumers and Vive Pro Eye probably even less. And that said HTC really doesn't get the marketing, I don't know how much money problems affect their marketing but the faults in there are so huge, like Vive Pro was really never ment to be a gaming HMD and even less just a VR HMD, where it was really aimed was VR/AR/MR HMD markets where it's actually quite cheap (compared to something like now dead Meta2 which costed something like $2500 or HoloLens with it's $3000 pricetag IIRC) and HTC hasn't really marketed it for it because if VR markets are still quite small just think about AR/MR markets (and to be sure, I'm not talking about those Windows MR HMDs). Apparently with Vive Pro Eye (Vive Pro Eyes site) they seem to be stumbling on to the same mistake and marketing it towards gamers in stead of "professional" use.

[GoldenSound]

11 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

The Vive lenses are heavily optimised for direct forward looking (that's why the IPD adjustment is very important) and if the eye tracking is what I hope/think it is, they will need to use lenses that allow you to look everywhere. But I can be as much wrong as I can be right.

 

They are yes. But the problem is that even with that considered, they are still really not great lenses.

The rift lenses are considerably better, with a MUCH larger "sweet-spot". 
And then the oculus go lenses are better again (if there was a revision of the rift with the go lenses + display I would literally buy it for that alone. The Oculus go display+lenses are wonderful)

 

 

11 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

 

The price difference has always been there and sadly with the high-end HMDs it has been twisted quite a lot. Like my friend was very fired up when he got Rift so much cheaper than I got my Vive and then the truth raised it's ugly head, no room-scale tracking and at the time no controllers and with those he actually ended up paying more.

I'm not sure how that happened. If you purchase Oculus + Touch + a third sensor its STILL cheaper than buying a vive.

Also, the idea that oculus can't do room-scale tracking is a complete myth.
I have owned both headsets, and both do room-scale absolutely fine. And those saying that oculus tracking is better than vive or vive tracking is better than oculus is also completely untrue.
The tracking on both headsets is great and neither one is more or less capable than the other.

[poochyena]

48 minutes ago, GoldenOne said:

Valve is making their own headset under the steam hardware brand

Ah, ok. So I guess HTC owns the "vive" brand?

[imreloadin]

HTC is still a company??

[Thaldor]

3 minutes ago, GoldenOne said:

They are yes. But the problem is that even with that considered, they are still really not great lenses.

The rift lenses are considerably better, with a MUCH larger "sweet-spot". 
And then the oculus go lenses are better again (if there was a revision of the rift with the go lenses + display I would literally buy it for that alone. The Oculus go display+lenses are wonderful)

Vives lenses are worse than Rifts. If the eye-tracking is iris-tracking as I imagine it could be, then there really can't be a sweetspot, because the image must be clear for the whole lens, just like with early Varjo prototypes which were modified Vives they had replaced the whole lens not only to make room for the extra HW but also to remove the problem of the sweetspot.

Quote

I'm not sure how that happened. If you purchase Oculus + Touch + a third sensor its STILL cheaper than buying a vive.

Let's just say it was a While ago. Around the time when Oculus made the first price drop to ~600€ and was shipped with only one sensor and two-sensor roomscale was really not recommended, so the 800€ pricetag for Vive was quite easy to top when he needed also good PCI-e USB3.0 interface also

 

Also for the controllers, there are some who might have some limited run Valve controllers for their Vives Some even have odd boxes with strong IR-emitters and cameras strapped to their HMDs so the controllers could be obsolete in some applications

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, mxk. said:

Interesting, isn't VR kinda dead? Maybe a good price point will encourage consumers.

As much as LTTs clickbait has falsely spread rumors its alive and growing

[mxk]

1 hour ago, GoldenOne said:

I hope so!

I think the standalone stuff is good no matter what.

My main concern is with the vive pro eye. 

a) if they have re-used the same awful lenses, that would kill it for me. I was really surprised they re-used the original vive lenses in the vive pro. If they do it again when this product CLEARLY has a focus on foveated rendering I will be pretty shocked.

b) I hope they price it right. Otherwise oculus will be laughing. I want there to be more competition. Right now the % market share of oculus is growing fast, mainly due to the extremely competitive pricing compared to vive. And if they have no competition in that price range then there is less drive for innovation

I was thinking about buying VR for the first time since my upcoming PC should be able to handle it pretty easily. Hopefully by the time I'm done building, there will be good options available.

[mxk]

4 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

As much as LTTs clickbait has falsely spread rumors its alive and growing

*getting beaned by the people you watch*

[Sakkura]

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

The price difference has always been there and sadly with the high-end HMDs it has been twisted quite a lot. Like my friend was very fired up when he got Rift so much cheaper than I got my Vive and then the truth raised it's ugly head, no room-scale tracking and at the time no controllers and with those he actually ended up paying more.

The price was the same for headset + controllers. And the Rift does have roomscale tracking... this old myth needs to die already.

[Thaldor]

29 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

The price was the same for headset + controllers. And the Rift does have roomscale tracking... this old myth needs to die already.

As I clarified, that hasn't been always the case. Original Rift package was HMD, 1 sensor, cables, Oculus Remote and Xbox controller, so out of the box there was no roomscale support and during that time the two-sensor tracking was bad (you could do it, but it really didn't shine and luckly got better later) and three sensors were needed. IIRC the second sensor was added to the box somewhere around 2017, might have been around the same time as Rift+Touch bundle was released, but before that Rift with roomscale tracking and controllers was more expensive than Vive, not to even mention that when Vive was released Rift didn't even have controllers appart from the remote and the included xbox controller. Overall price for Rift+Touch around the end of the 2016 to early 2017 when I bought mine Vive was around 960€ (600€ Rift + 2x sensors 80€/piece + Touch 200€) while I got Vive for 800€.

[Froody129]

The Cosmos seems to be the same idea as WMR (which I think is very underrated) but no wires. Great for no hassle VR is there aren't signal issues and the price is right. I really like the idea of VR but the current implementations aren't really something for the masses 

[Sakkura]

8 hours ago, Thaldor said:

As I clarified, that hasn't been always the case. Original Rift package was HMD, 1 sensor, cables, Oculus Remote and Xbox controller, so out of the box there was no roomscale support and during that time the two-sensor tracking was bad (you could do it, but it really didn't shine and luckly got better later) and three sensors were needed. IIRC the second sensor was added to the box somewhere around 2017, might have been around the same time as Rift+Touch bundle was released, but before that Rift with roomscale tracking and controllers was more expensive than Vive, not to even mention that when Vive was released Rift didn't even have controllers appart from the remote and the included xbox controller. Overall price for Rift+Touch around the end of the 2016 to early 2017 when I bought mine Vive was around 960€ (600€ Rift + 2x sensors 80€/piece + Touch 200€) while I got Vive for 800€.

Roomscale doesn't make a lot of sense without motion controllers, though in actual fact you had effectively roomscale tracking because tracking just the headset is much easier.

 

The controllers were added in late 2016 and came with a second sensor, allowing proper roomscale. It was never more expensive than the Vive.

 

Your pricing info is wrong. The Vive cost €900 (plus €90 shipping in my country) at launch. The Rift cost €700 + €200 controllers (free shipping on each).

[Kochiha Ichihara]

11 hours ago, Nowak said:

I'm still under the idea that VR can work really well in education. Better than in gaming, even. Glad to see that HTC hasn't given up on the Vive brand.

I've been saying this for ages and ages. What has me most excited is some tools I've spied on places like GitHub that allow interfacing with other programs, such as using a VR environment as a sort of MIDI controller that then records into a DAW or even works as its own audio workstation within the program. Imagine getting software synths to run on something like that, so you could operate a Yamaha CS-80 in VR without having to break the bank and your back getting a real one!