HTC reveals Vive Focus Plus, enhancing the standalone VR HMD
The standalone HTC Vive Focus Plus uses dual 6DoF VR controllers, bringing the experience closer to the standard set by tethered HMDs.
Standalone virtual reality experiences are some of the most accessible in the market and HTC is enhancing their offering for that specific type of VR. The company is upgrading Focus to the HTC Vive Focus Plus, adding the ability to use dual 6DoF controllers. This makes the standalone headset function more like what has come to be known as the traditional VR experience, giving users full freedom to interact with a virtual environment.
“At Vive, the announcement of Vive Focus Plus furthers our commitment to rapidly iterate and refine the VR market for both businesses and consumers,” said HTC Vive General Manager of Americas Daniel O'Brien in the press release. “This rollout of Vive Focus Plus leads the way for deeper immersion, more realistic training, and simulation, and easier porting of experiences from PC to the stand-alone category.”
The HTC Vive Focus Plus will be available for purchase in Q2 2019 and will ship with Kiosk Mode, Gaze Support, and tools to help manage multiple tools all at once. This makes it an ideal product for commercial customers, providing an easy platform to set up for small or large businesses. For developers, the inclusion of two 6DoF controllers also makes it easier to port PC VR experiences to the standalone VR platform, since they won't have to rework the control schemes they've already carefully developed for their interactive titles. This also makes the HTC Vive Focus Plus a more direct competitor to the Oculus Quest.
“In our dedication to occupational health and safety, we easily ported our entire Hazard Spotting range from the Vive Pro to Vive Focus Plus to facilitate our large corporation deployments,” said Olivier Pierre, COO, and Founder, Immersive Factory. “Vive Focus Plus will perfectly immerse our clients in realistic environments enabling full movement, which supports memorization of process and procedures, and improves behavior by creating consequences to their actions. Having a professional standalone headset is very important for us to widely integrate and deploy virtual reality for workforce training at large groups, with plants all other the world, who previously saw the equipment as a barrier.”
Immersive Factory and SimforHealth are just a couple of the entities already putting the new HTC Vive Focus Plus to work in their workspaces. Interested companies can head to the Vive Enterprises webpage to get the ball rolling on integrating the Vive platform with their company. If you're in Barcelona, Spain next week, HTC will be showing off the Vive Focus Plus at the Mobile World Congress and spotlighting partner experiences that other companies could benefit from. Stay tuned to Shacknews for additional gaming and tech updates.
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