Two New HTC Vive Headsets And A Bunch Of New VR Services Are On The Way

Avatar photoBy Shannon Grixti

HTC has today announced two new Vive headsets as well as a bunch of useful services that genuinely seem like they’ll change the way that gamers consume virtual reality content.

VIVE PRO EYE HEADSET

The Vive Pro Eye headset is their new high-end headset that has built-in eye tracking, so that the headset can track the users’ eye direction for better VR performance. It’ll also ship with foveated rendering support, which basically means that games will render fewer pixels in the parts of the display that the user isn’t currently looking at.

No release date or price is set for the Pro Eye headset.

VIVE COSMOS HEADSET

Probably more impressive is the Vive Cosmos headset which is a standalone VR headset that has two front-facing cameras, two side-facing cameras and a pair of handheld wands. It’ll be compatible with PCs as well as smart phones and shouldn’t need any other external devices. It’s slated for release in the second quarter of 2019, but no pricing has been confirmed.

NEW VR SERVICES

This is where things get impressive, HTC announced a number of new services. The first is Viveport Infinity which is practically Netflix for VR gamers. The service will require a monthly fee but will then give access to an ever growing list of VR titles. HTC said that they were looking at launching with 500 games, which is pretty damn great. This is launching April 5th.

HTC is also partnering with Mozilla to bring a VR version of Firefox. It’s called Firefox Reality and it will will provide a native VR experience.

The VIVE Reality System will bring meaningful experiences to HTC Vive owners. The first experiences are called Origin which will create basically create a social hub in Virtual Reality (PlayStation home, anyone?). Lens will transport you to other virtual worlds and applications.