HTC has announced that it is working on a new AR/VR headset that will be launched as a standalone device. The headset was announced via The Verge, and more details will be released in January during the CES conference. While HTC did not provide many details about the headset, it did confirm that it will have cameras on the outside for a mixed reality experience.
HTC’s global head of product, Shen Ye, also revealed that the headset will be priced differently than the Meta Quest 2. Ye stated that “we’re in an era when consumer VR headsets have been massively subsidized by companies that are trying to vacuum up and take personal data to provide to advertisers. We don’t believe the way that we want to approach it is to compromise on privacy.”
The new headset, called the Vive Flowcus, will have a resolution of 1920×1920 pixels per eye and a refresh rate of 120 Hz. HTC claims that it will be “one of the lightest headsets on the market”. It will support 6DOF controllers with optical handtracking, though it is not yet clear if eye-tracking will be supported. It will have cameras on the front and sides for video throughput, but the battery life is only two hours. The Vive Flowcus is reportedly powered by a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset, 8 GB DDR5 RAM, and has active cooling and a depth sensor.
According to Shen Ye, the Vive Flowcus will be able to be used for gaming, entertainment, sports, and enterprise applications. HTC will unveil the new VR headset on January 5th at the Consumer Electronics Show 2023 in Las Vegas.