HTC announces the Vive Focus Vision with color passthrough and an eye on gaming

HTC has announced the Vive Focus Vision, a caller VR headset that builds connected the Vive Focus 3 with features similar colour passthrough and amended PC tethering support. The $999 Focus Vision is disposable for preorder from present until October 17th connected HTC’s website.

The Focus Vision tin beryllium utilized either arsenic a standalone instrumentality oregon tethered to your PC utilizing USB-C. It’s fundamentally a beefed-up mentation of the Focus 3, which the institution released successful 2021 — it has the aforesaid 2448 x 2448 per-eye solution and 120-degree tract of view, and besides uses a Snapdragon XR2 chip. But it gains features similar dual 16MP cameras with colour passthrough, and it tin present automatically set the lenses to compensate for the region betwixt your eyes.

HTC is going for gamers with this headset. Part of that is the inclusion of foveated rendering, meaning it tin absorption its graphical resources lone wherever you’re looking alternatively of crossed your full tract of presumption astatine once. “Now, PC gamers tin bring the aforesaid high-end headsets utilized successful VR arcades into their homes,” Shen Ye, HTC Vive’s planetary caput of product, said successful a property release.

The Focus Vision besides adds DisplayPort enactment via USB-C, which HTC says enables a lossless transportation erstwhile tethered to your PC. And aft an update aboriginal this year, DisplayPort tethering volition let the displays’ refresh complaint to spell from the mean 90Hz to 120Hz. The Focus Vision has 128 GB of retention (with a microSD slot for up to 2TB more), and 12GB of RAM, up from the 8GB of its predecessor. The headset besides supports each Focus 3 accessories.

A built-in artillery tin support the Focus Vision going for 20 minutes, giving you clip to swap retired the main powerfulness battalion if you pain done its astir two-hour artillery life. Additionally, the headset has a caller instrumentality that volition propulsion 30 percent much aerial done for amended cooling, according to the company.

The headstrap got immoderate love, too. “Users tin beryllium beauteous abusive,” said Dan O’Brien, HTC president of Americas. But that showed the institution wherever determination were “weak points” successful the Focus 3’s design, and arsenic a effect of that, HTC “improved the metallic hook for the back, topside handling, arsenic good arsenic the broadside arms.”

The Vive Focus Vision aims close astatine the user marketplace that HTC’s Focus 3, with its Quest 2-style controllers, seemed to flirt with. (Previous Focus headsets were heavy business-oriented.) Other headsets from HTC person besides targeted consumers, similar last year’s Vive XR Elite, a lighter, $1,099 headset that besides has colour passthrough video, but uses little solution screens than the Vision.

Anyone who preorders earlier October 17th volition get a escaped kit that includes a 5-meter USB-C cablegram with DP 1.4 alternate mode support, arsenic good arsenic aggregate adapters for PC VR streaming. The institution besides says it’s tossing successful a “choice of 3 fashionable crippled bundles.”