7 ms·

HTC looks at option to sell or demerge Vive

75 points by richardboegli 9y ago

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble? Is it jettisoning an unprofitable money pit or is it the opposite - that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels? Both (VR not doing well, HTC needs $)? Not familiar with the numbers. Fuck. If Google ends up with Vive and Facebook has Occulus that'll about kill my interest in the tech. Both of those companies would rather flail aimlessly at making money over providing a quality product and the last thing I'd like to do is invest in their ecosystems further. Though Google is capable of subsidizing the tech for awhile, which might be nice... It's finally starting to get reasonably priced for what it is (I have earned the right to complain; bought a Vive a ~year ago). Haven't touched it for about 8 of those months because the games weren't fundamentally better than non-VR and in a lot of ways were worse. So much potential there, though. Play Quake in VR and realize what 21 year old (and free) tech is capable of.
- notatoad 9y ago
  Vive is the only part of HTC that's making any money right now. HTC is not doing well.
- lwansbrough 9y ago
  Don't worry, VR has been a colossal failure regardless of HTC's reasoning.
  - andybak 9y ago
    Why do you feel so strongly about it? I'm curious about your definition of "failure". It sounds very final.
- cbhl 9y ago
  Having used Oculus, Daydream, and Vive, I still think Vive provides the best experience. Vive is "room scale", whereas Oculus and Daydream both are "pivoting in an office chair scale". (Oculus has experimental tracking cameras now, but you can't assume the whole install base has them.) But VR as a whole is still in its infancy. Some experiences don't work for users who are too tall or short (say, children). The install base is also still too small to run a profitable business creating just VR content.
  - carlosdp 9y ago
    The Oculus camera tracking system is not experimental, it's been in user's hands for years and you can safely assume the whole active install base has them without any risk...
  - TwoBit 9y ago
    The big room scale situations are the only cases in which Vive is better. The VR is smoother on Rift, the apps are better, the headset is more comfortable, the Touch controllers are better, the optics are less blurry to the view extents, the software is much less buggy, etc.
    - andybak 9y ago
      I now have both and it's close enough that I still tend to use the Vive over the Rift day to day. I was surprised that the Rift controllers weren't so obviously better that I wanted to switch. Familiarity trumped other factors on that front.
      - ekimekim 9y ago
        I actually greatly prefer the vive controllers. The Rift controllers have thumbsticks, which I detest with a passion and find painful and uncontrollable. The Steam Controller touchpad feels completely different and natural. Of course, people who have grown up playing on controllers with thumbsticks will disagree, but I suspect the touchpad comes more intuitively to the non-gamer market.
    - 9y ago
- fsloth 9y ago
  "Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble?" No, it's gaining speed in fact. Most of the applications are not in consumer but in business. See the new Microsoft VR platform and the headsets from HP and Asus. Those are the reason the current Vive is not so hot anymore - they manage full movement without large cables and without difficult to set up beacons. If Varjo's varied resolution technology with eye tracking which enables high resolution rendering only where it's needed succeeds as promised that could be a huge boon (http://www.varjo.com http://www.varjo.com) But - for professional applications, not games.
  - tigershark 9y ago
    What is the new Microsoft VR platform? I never heard of it and it seems extremely unlikely to me that they would throw money to a VR platform after all their investments in AR.
    - fsloth 9y ago
      This is kind of old news but the devkits are only now coming out - and who knows when the devices reach consumers en masse. The difference with these new devices and Hololens is that Hololens is a standalone selfcontained device with compute unit and display with AR capable optics while these new headsets are full block-the-real-world vr headsets, more like Vive, except they don't need beacons for head tracking but use device mounted cameras. In effect, they are lighter and need less setup than Vive. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/acer-windows-mixed-reality-headset-developer-edition/8pb4twx13m2n/7zt9 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/acer-windows-mixed-r... http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/141215-windows-mixed-reality-what-is-it-what-headsets-are-available-and-when-can-you-get-it.html http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/141215-windows-mixed-reality...
      - tigershark 9y ago
        This has nothing to do with VR. I know very well hololens, and exactly for this reason I said that would be very strange for Microsoft to invest in VR given all the huge time and money investment in AR. Hololens is AR not VR.
- TwoBit 9y ago
  Aside from the better room scale tracking, the Facebook VR system is better than the Vive (and all other VR systems) on almost all other counts. So I don't understand what you are talking about regarding a quality product.
- photojosh 9y ago
  There's a port of Quake to iPhone-based VR using any old Cardboard headset: https://github.com/Izhido/Quake_For_OSX https://github.com/Izhido/Quake_For_OSX I got to compile (had to fix some bugs in the source), and played for about 5 minutes before the motion sickness hit hard.
  - andybak 9y ago
    I'm really not surprised. Cardboard is very prone to inducing nausea as there's not any attempt to ensure decent latency. Daydream/GearVR is the base level for mobile VR and even they are much more disorientating than PC VR due to the lack of positional head tracking. Currently it's Vive/Rift or don't bother calling it VR as far as I'm concerned. We'll see what Microsoft and the standalone Daydream with inside-out tracking bring to the table.
- lookACamel 9y ago
  > that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels As a division, Vive is doing very well but HTC is primarily a phone company which has been dying a slow death. From an overall strategic perspective it looks like HTC has no choice but to look for a buyer but as the article points out "A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer".
avaer 9y ago
If anyone gets it, I hope it's Valve.
- elefanten 9y ago
  Was about to say this. It's based on their tech after all. Would be nice to see them take the fight to Oculus. But somehow I'm guessing they probably don't want to manage manufacturing.
- deleted 9y ago
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DigitalJack 9y ago
I tried out a VR kit at the mall. It was a novelty experience for me. I’d have been living the dream if it was 1995. But it was just OK to me now. Back in 95 I was in college and did a project using an SGI Origin something or other with an infinite reality engine, VR headset and inductance based flock of birds tracking system. They felt about the same to me, although the graphics then were like that Duran Duran video. The main reason I’d want a car system today would be to free myself from a fixed screen. Not for games in particular but for general computing use. We’re getting there but the resolution isn’t there yet.
- andybak 9y ago
  If your jaw didn't hit the floor, then it was either poorly set up or the choice of demo content was bad. My immediate reaction to trying to Rift CV1 was to open my wallet.
  - zootam 9y ago
    they said "vr kit". that could have been anything other than an oculus CV1 or vive, without controllers too.
  - lowmagnet 9y ago
    I think the biggest barrier is people setting their friends up or people running demos and not properly adjusting the headset (vertically, in/out, and the IPD slider) before starting. Or not cleaning the lenses, etc. There is definitely a "wow" factor to a properly set up headset, but incompetent demos won't help you there.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Yeah, I tried a PSVR, which is said to be worse than the Vive or Rift, and it still shocked me how immersive it was. I have a long running bet against the future popularity of VR, and that experience certainly shook my confidence in my position.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    Wait a a minute, why are those the only two options? I'm a long time AR developer and have seen nearly every generation of VR since the early 2000s (NASA, Sensics, Oculus) and have never had my "mind blown" or "jaw hit the floor." I think people just have a super low bar for being impressed.
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Stratoscope 9y ago
A couple of comments mention 1995 and 21 year old technology. For the curious, here is a PC Magazine article on VR from March 1995: https://books.google.com/books?id=79i1lfAqumUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA168#v=onepage&q&f=true https://books.google.com/books?id=79i1lfAqumUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
- icebraining 9y ago
  A few weeks ago I discovered that the CSS 1.0 spec (1996) uses a VR scene as an example of an environment in which to apply the rules. It was certainly in the tech zeitgeist back then!
  - alnitak 9y ago
    Are you talking about VRML?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      No, just a comment in the spec: "Note that an application may reinterpret an explicit size, depending on the context. E.g., inside a VR scene a font may get a different size because of perspective distortion."
shostack 9y ago
I used to be a pretty hardcore gamer. Now I'm a bit older, have other responsibilities, and considerably less time. Also, home improvement is expensive. I desperately wanted to love VR, but could not bring myself to buy a unit. The demos I tried just could not bring me to pay that amount of money given the limited games and limited quality of them. Many of the ones with the greatest potential seem like they require multiple friends to also have VR. I have a Daydream View headset and have barely touched it since getting it with my Pixel XL. Discoverability for Daydream apps on the Play store is a horrible experience right now. There's not even a filter, and no way to sort by newest, so you end up seeing the same crap over and over mixed in with generic VR apps that aren't made for Daydream (and thus a lower quality experience), or random apps that show up when searching for "Daydream" because that's the best way I've found to filter. I DESPERATELY want VR to take off, and I've wanted this my entire geeky life. But it just isn't there yet. Once the price comes down and quality comes up, and ideally isn't tethered, then I think we'll see a huge market open up. But I spent $5k on my last gaming computer (excluding peripherals) a few years ago, and I couldn't bring myself to purchase this.
- cyrux004 9y ago
  I was a casual gamer and I agree with whats written here. I did actually try the Vive for a week but passed on buying. I am actually pretty excited about AR these days though. Apart from games, productivity apps will be big on AR
- contingencies 9y ago
  Same. Here in Shenzhen there are VR gaming houses where you can try the tech from various companies in a pay-to-play environment. Nothing I played really convinced me to buy... a lot of the issues are with FPS movement in a walking scenario. (Car steering wheel systems and joystick based spaceships are less destructive to the illusion.) The most fun I had was on a moving horse saddle thing, where you basically hold a gun and play cowboy with your feet in the stirrups against zombies in a virtual desert! Awesome experience :)
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Lammy 9y ago
Maybe Palmer Luckey will buy it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6w1x7o/what_do_you_guys_think_should_i_buy_vive/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6w1x7o/what_do_you_gu...
- Grue3 9y ago
  >EDIT: The company, not the headset. Already have one of those. Ok, that was funny.
axaxs 9y ago
My opinion? VR is on its last legs. I've tried it, and while it's cool... blocking my entire vision and attention just isn't realistic. That said, from what I've seen, I do think AR is going to be the next big thing.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Eh, I don't think so. It's huge in the haunt industry right now. The real problem for home use is how much space it takes, and how expensive the entire experiences are. a short demo "game" is insanely expensive.
- sigi45 9y ago
  Last leg? It hasn't started yet. Yes there is a hype, yes we read everywhere about it for a while but thats it. Prices are still to high, people need to get more experience in it and investors need to be convinced. This takes a while. Only because tec is so fast, doesn't mean vr is dead. In the next years i'm guessing things like this will come or are on the way already: - VR Cafes - VR lighter, cheaper and with higher resolution - VR for industrie (especially training people in VR will be huge) - VR experience centers where you have VR / AR by having a VR Headset and interact with the Environment - VR for building houses, renovating flats
  - glenndebacker 9y ago
    It doesn't help if a lot of people get nauseous trying it... That seems a bigger hurdle then the price or investors. It's even worse then with the 3D-movie fad where people only complained about headaches. I've had the Oculus Rift for some time but in the end I sold it. At the current stage with the problems the platforms still have I honestly don't see it as worth investing my time in it. If I would place a bet short-term it wouldn't be on VR but rather AR. Then again there are certainly niche's where it has his place but as a general usage device? Nah.
  - tigershark 9y ago
    I don't really think so. AR is not very far in the future and it will really be a mind blowing experience, especially with multiple focal planes. VR is born dead if it doesn't manage to become mainstream before the huge AR revolution.
methodin 9y ago
VR won't be a huge knockout until wearable contacts get developed. I would imagine that would be followed by implants. Until then VR is a cool novelty and it will be spread by actual interesting apps/games being developed for it that aren't just ports.
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joshstrange 9y ago
Honestly they only thing I'm interested in when it comes to VR is virtual desktops. I've not played any games on VR but I don't game much anymore. Really I just want to have unlimited virtual desktops for work.
- sirtaj 9y ago
  And that's something that's probably better addressed by AR anyway.
  - joshstrange 9y ago
    Agreed, I really want n-1 of my screens to be virtual and 1 to be physical for sharing with coworkers (until they all get AR/VR headsets of their own which we can share virtually.
SimonPStevens 9y ago
HTC vive is in trouble. The tech is basically licensed from valve (I say licensed, valve give it away for free I believe). There are multiple competing headsets (LG) due for release soon also licensing the valve lighthouse tech. But no one is interested in the HTC app store, everyone gets their content from valve via steam. So HTC can't sell their headset as a loss leader and make the money back on games, because they don't have any monopoly on the games channel. The other major competitor Oculus is owned by Facebook who basically have infinite money. They have undercut the price of the vive significantly (presumably selling it at a loss) and throw money at all the studios to make Oculus exclusive content. I have a vive, I think it's amazing tech. I think the lighthouse technology is far more promising than the camera tracking used by Oculus. I far prefer the open philosophy, and the strategy of not making content hardware exclusive. I want it to succeed (and maybe it will via other partners with valve). But right now, i think HTC are going to struggle to make it work for them.
- aphextron 9y ago
  > I think the lighthouse technology is far more promising than the camera tracking used by Oculus. This is the real secret sauce for Vive, and it's completely designed and owned by Valve. Combined with their lackluster new phone, I think the future is pretty grim for HTC.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
    Lackluster new phone except for the awesome screen, top notch specs, nice battery life, comfortable UI close to stock Android, zero lag in the UI (ahem, Samsung, are you listening?), lightning fast fingerprint reader at a comfortable position at the front (still there, Samsung?), great camera (best mobile camera according to dxomark), rather handy "squeezable" option (customizable, as opposed to e.g. Bixby button), best sound in any smartphone hands down, impressive noise-cancelling in-ear headphones included (this comes from an owner of the Bose QC25's), and quick charge 3. But yeah, it has bezels and now the latest fad is bezelless (making phones more prone to break on falls and to accidentally touching the screen if you grab them incorrectly). Plus it's not Samsung and they don't have money to put all the tremendously biased smartphone press in their favor. So it is automatically labelled as lackluster, like everything HTC has made for the last 5 years or so, including fantastic and innovative phones like the M7, M8 and 10. Meanwhile, others make phones that freaking explode and still get undivided praise by the press.

75 points by richardboegli 9y ago

Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble? Is it jettisoning an unprofitable money pit or is it the opposite - that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels? Both (VR not doing well, HTC needs $)? Not familiar with the numbers. Fuck. If Google ends up with Vive and Facebook has Occulus that'll about kill my interest in the tech. Both of those companies would rather flail aimlessly at making money over providing a quality product and the last thing I'd like to do is invest in their ecosystems further. Though Google is capable of subsidizing the tech for awhile, which might be nice... It's finally starting to get reasonably priced for what it is (I have earned the right to complain; bought a Vive a ~year ago). Haven't touched it for about 8 of those months because the games weren't fundamentally better than non-VR and in a lot of ways were worse. So much potential there, though. Play Quake in VR and realize what 21 year old (and free) tech is capable of.

notatoad 9y ago
Vive is the only part of HTC that's making any money right now. HTC is not doing well.
lwansbrough 9y ago
Don't worry, VR has been a colossal failure regardless of HTC's reasoning.
- andybak 9y ago
  Why do you feel so strongly about it? I'm curious about your definition of "failure". It sounds very final.
cbhl 9y ago
Having used Oculus, Daydream, and Vive, I still think Vive provides the best experience. Vive is "room scale", whereas Oculus and Daydream both are "pivoting in an office chair scale". (Oculus has experimental tracking cameras now, but you can't assume the whole install base has them.) But VR as a whole is still in its infancy. Some experiences don't work for users who are too tall or short (say, children). The install base is also still too small to run a profitable business creating just VR content.
- carlosdp 9y ago
  The Oculus camera tracking system is not experimental, it's been in user's hands for years and you can safely assume the whole active install base has them without any risk...
- TwoBit 9y ago
  The big room scale situations are the only cases in which Vive is better. The VR is smoother on Rift, the apps are better, the headset is more comfortable, the Touch controllers are better, the optics are less blurry to the view extents, the software is much less buggy, etc.
  - andybak 9y ago
    I now have both and it's close enough that I still tend to use the Vive over the Rift day to day. I was surprised that the Rift controllers weren't so obviously better that I wanted to switch. Familiarity trumped other factors on that front.
    - ekimekim 9y ago
      I actually greatly prefer the vive controllers. The Rift controllers have thumbsticks, which I detest with a passion and find painful and uncontrollable. The Steam Controller touchpad feels completely different and natural. Of course, people who have grown up playing on controllers with thumbsticks will disagree, but I suspect the touchpad comes more intuitively to the non-gamer market.
  - 9y ago
fsloth 9y ago
"Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble?" No, it's gaining speed in fact. Most of the applications are not in consumer but in business. See the new Microsoft VR platform and the headsets from HP and Asus. Those are the reason the current Vive is not so hot anymore - they manage full movement without large cables and without difficult to set up beacons. If Varjo's varied resolution technology with eye tracking which enables high resolution rendering only where it's needed succeeds as promised that could be a huge boon (http://www.varjo.com http://www.varjo.com) But - for professional applications, not games.
- tigershark 9y ago
  What is the new Microsoft VR platform? I never heard of it and it seems extremely unlikely to me that they would throw money to a VR platform after all their investments in AR.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    This is kind of old news but the devkits are only now coming out - and who knows when the devices reach consumers en masse. The difference with these new devices and Hololens is that Hololens is a standalone selfcontained device with compute unit and display with AR capable optics while these new headsets are full block-the-real-world vr headsets, more like Vive, except they don't need beacons for head tracking but use device mounted cameras. In effect, they are lighter and need less setup than Vive. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/acer-windows-mixed-reality-headset-developer-edition/8pb4twx13m2n/7zt9 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/acer-windows-mixed-r... http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/141215-windows-mixed-reality-what-is-it-what-headsets-are-available-and-when-can-you-get-it.html http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/141215-windows-mixed-reality...
    - tigershark 9y ago
      This has nothing to do with VR. I know very well hololens, and exactly for this reason I said that would be very strange for Microsoft to invest in VR given all the huge time and money investment in AR. Hololens is AR not VR.
TwoBit 9y ago
Aside from the better room scale tracking, the Facebook VR system is better than the Vive (and all other VR systems) on almost all other counts. So I don't understand what you are talking about regarding a quality product.
photojosh 9y ago
There's a port of Quake to iPhone-based VR using any old Cardboard headset: https://github.com/Izhido/Quake_For_OSX https://github.com/Izhido/Quake_For_OSX I got to compile (had to fix some bugs in the source), and played for about 5 minutes before the motion sickness hit hard.
- andybak 9y ago
  I'm really not surprised. Cardboard is very prone to inducing nausea as there's not any attempt to ensure decent latency. Daydream/GearVR is the base level for mobile VR and even they are much more disorientating than PC VR due to the lack of positional head tracking. Currently it's Vive/Rift or don't bother calling it VR as far as I'm concerned. We'll see what Microsoft and the standalone Daydream with inside-out tracking bring to the table.
lookACamel 9y ago
> that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels As a division, Vive is doing very well but HTC is primarily a phone company which has been dying a slow death. From an overall strategic perspective it looks like HTC has no choice but to look for a buyer but as the article points out "A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer".

avaer 9y ago

If anyone gets it, I hope it's Valve.

elefanten 9y ago
Was about to say this. It's based on their tech after all. Would be nice to see them take the fight to Oculus. But somehow I'm guessing they probably don't want to manage manufacturing.
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DigitalJack 9y ago

I tried out a VR kit at the mall. It was a novelty experience for me. I’d have been living the dream if it was 1995. But it was just OK to me now. Back in 95 I was in college and did a project using an SGI Origin something or other with an infinite reality engine, VR headset and inductance based flock of birds tracking system. They felt about the same to me, although the graphics then were like that Duran Duran video. The main reason I’d want a car system today would be to free myself from a fixed screen. Not for games in particular but for general computing use. We’re getting there but the resolution isn’t there yet.

andybak 9y ago
If your jaw didn't hit the floor, then it was either poorly set up or the choice of demo content was bad. My immediate reaction to trying to Rift CV1 was to open my wallet.
- zootam 9y ago
  they said "vr kit". that could have been anything other than an oculus CV1 or vive, without controllers too.
- lowmagnet 9y ago
  I think the biggest barrier is people setting their friends up or people running demos and not properly adjusting the headset (vertically, in/out, and the IPD slider) before starting. Or not cleaning the lenses, etc. There is definitely a "wow" factor to a properly set up headset, but incompetent demos won't help you there.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Yeah, I tried a PSVR, which is said to be worse than the Vive or Rift, and it still shocked me how immersive it was. I have a long running bet against the future popularity of VR, and that experience certainly shook my confidence in my position.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Wait a a minute, why are those the only two options? I'm a long time AR developer and have seen nearly every generation of VR since the early 2000s (NASA, Sensics, Oculus) and have never had my "mind blown" or "jaw hit the floor." I think people just have a super low bar for being impressed.

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Stratoscope 9y ago

A couple of comments mention 1995 and 21 year old technology. For the curious, here is a PC Magazine article on VR from March 1995: https://books.google.com/books?id=79i1lfAqumUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA168#v=onepage&q&f=true https://books.google.com/books?id=79i1lfAqumUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...

icebraining 9y ago
A few weeks ago I discovered that the CSS 1.0 spec (1996) uses a VR scene as an example of an environment in which to apply the rules. It was certainly in the tech zeitgeist back then!
- alnitak 9y ago
  Are you talking about VRML?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    No, just a comment in the spec: "Note that an application may reinterpret an explicit size, depending on the context. E.g., inside a VR scene a font may get a different size because of perspective distortion."

shostack 9y ago

I used to be a pretty hardcore gamer. Now I'm a bit older, have other responsibilities, and considerably less time. Also, home improvement is expensive. I desperately wanted to love VR, but could not bring myself to buy a unit. The demos I tried just could not bring me to pay that amount of money given the limited games and limited quality of them. Many of the ones with the greatest potential seem like they require multiple friends to also have VR. I have a Daydream View headset and have barely touched it since getting it with my Pixel XL. Discoverability for Daydream apps on the Play store is a horrible experience right now. There's not even a filter, and no way to sort by newest, so you end up seeing the same crap over and over mixed in with generic VR apps that aren't made for Daydream (and thus a lower quality experience), or random apps that show up when searching for "Daydream" because that's the best way I've found to filter. I DESPERATELY want VR to take off, and I've wanted this my entire geeky life. But it just isn't there yet. Once the price comes down and quality comes up, and ideally isn't tethered, then I think we'll see a huge market open up. But I spent $5k on my last gaming computer (excluding peripherals) a few years ago, and I couldn't bring myself to purchase this.

cyrux004 9y ago
I was a casual gamer and I agree with whats written here. I did actually try the Vive for a week but passed on buying. I am actually pretty excited about AR these days though. Apart from games, productivity apps will be big on AR
contingencies 9y ago
Same. Here in Shenzhen there are VR gaming houses where you can try the tech from various companies in a pay-to-play environment. Nothing I played really convinced me to buy... a lot of the issues are with FPS movement in a walking scenario. (Car steering wheel systems and joystick based spaceships are less destructive to the illusion.) The most fun I had was on a moving horse saddle thing, where you basically hold a gun and play cowboy with your feet in the stirrups against zombies in a virtual desert! Awesome experience :)
- deleted 9y ago
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Lammy 9y ago

Maybe Palmer Luckey will buy it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6w1x7o/what_do_you_guys_think_should_i_buy_vive/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6w1x7o/what_do_you_gu...

Grue3 9y ago
>EDIT: The company, not the headset. Already have one of those. Ok, that was funny.

axaxs 9y ago

My opinion? VR is on its last legs. I've tried it, and while it's cool... blocking my entire vision and attention just isn't realistic. That said, from what I've seen, I do think AR is going to be the next big thing.

dawnerd 9y ago
Eh, I don't think so. It's huge in the haunt industry right now. The real problem for home use is how much space it takes, and how expensive the entire experiences are. a short demo "game" is insanely expensive.
sigi45 9y ago
Last leg? It hasn't started yet. Yes there is a hype, yes we read everywhere about it for a while but thats it. Prices are still to high, people need to get more experience in it and investors need to be convinced. This takes a while. Only because tec is so fast, doesn't mean vr is dead. In the next years i'm guessing things like this will come or are on the way already: - VR Cafes - VR lighter, cheaper and with higher resolution - VR for industrie (especially training people in VR will be huge) - VR experience centers where you have VR / AR by having a VR Headset and interact with the Environment - VR for building houses, renovating flats
- glenndebacker 9y ago
  It doesn't help if a lot of people get nauseous trying it... That seems a bigger hurdle then the price or investors. It's even worse then with the 3D-movie fad where people only complained about headaches. I've had the Oculus Rift for some time but in the end I sold it. At the current stage with the problems the platforms still have I honestly don't see it as worth investing my time in it. If I would place a bet short-term it wouldn't be on VR but rather AR. Then again there are certainly niche's where it has his place but as a general usage device? Nah.
- tigershark 9y ago
  I don't really think so. AR is not very far in the future and it will really be a mind blowing experience, especially with multiple focal planes. VR is born dead if it doesn't manage to become mainstream before the huge AR revolution.

methodin 9y ago

VR won't be a huge knockout until wearable contacts get developed. I would imagine that would be followed by implants. Until then VR is a cool novelty and it will be spread by actual interesting apps/games being developed for it that aren't just ports.

deleted 9y ago
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joshstrange 9y ago

Honestly they only thing I'm interested in when it comes to VR is virtual desktops. I've not played any games on VR but I don't game much anymore. Really I just want to have unlimited virtual desktops for work.

sirtaj 9y ago
And that's something that's probably better addressed by AR anyway.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  Agreed, I really want n-1 of my screens to be virtual and 1 to be physical for sharing with coworkers (until they all get AR/VR headsets of their own which we can share virtually.

SimonPStevens 9y ago

HTC vive is in trouble. The tech is basically licensed from valve (I say licensed, valve give it away for free I believe). There are multiple competing headsets (LG) due for release soon also licensing the valve lighthouse tech. But no one is interested in the HTC app store, everyone gets their content from valve via steam. So HTC can't sell their headset as a loss leader and make the money back on games, because they don't have any monopoly on the games channel. The other major competitor Oculus is owned by Facebook who basically have infinite money. They have undercut the price of the vive significantly (presumably selling it at a loss) and throw money at all the studios to make Oculus exclusive content. I have a vive, I think it's amazing tech. I think the lighthouse technology is far more promising than the camera tracking used by Oculus. I far prefer the open philosophy, and the strategy of not making content hardware exclusive. I want it to succeed (and maybe it will via other partners with valve). But right now, i think HTC are going to struggle to make it work for them.

aphextron 9y ago
> I think the lighthouse technology is far more promising than the camera tracking used by Oculus. This is the real secret sauce for Vive, and it's completely designed and owned by Valve. Combined with their lackluster new phone, I think the future is pretty grim for HTC.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  Lackluster new phone except for the awesome screen, top notch specs, nice battery life, comfortable UI close to stock Android, zero lag in the UI (ahem, Samsung, are you listening?), lightning fast fingerprint reader at a comfortable position at the front (still there, Samsung?), great camera (best mobile camera according to dxomark), rather handy "squeezable" option (customizable, as opposed to e.g. Bixby button), best sound in any smartphone hands down, impressive noise-cancelling in-ear headphones included (this comes from an owner of the Bose QC25's), and quick charge 3. But yeah, it has bezels and now the latest fad is bezelless (making phones more prone to break on falls and to accidentally touching the screen if you grab them incorrectly). Plus it's not Samsung and they don't have money to put all the tremendously biased smartphone press in their favor. So it is automatically labelled as lackluster, like everything HTC has made for the last 5 years or so, including fantastic and innovative phones like the M7, M8 and 10. Meanwhile, others make phones that freaking explode and still get undivided praise by the press.