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 pinch features for illustration colour passthrough and amended PC tethering support. The $999 Focus Vision is disposable for preorder from now until October 17th connected HTC’s website.

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

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

The Focus Vision besides adds DisplayPort support via USB-C, which HTC says enables a lossless relationship erstwhile tethered to your PC. And aft an update later this year, DisplayPort tethering will let the displays’ refresh complaint to spell from the normal 90Hz to 120Hz. The Focus Vision has 128GB 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 switch retired the main powerfulness battalion if you pain done its astir two-hour artillery life. Additionally, the headset has a caller instrumentality that will propulsion 30 percent much aerial done for amended cooling, according to the company.

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

The Vive Focus Vision intends correct astatine the user marketplace that HTC’s Focus 3, pinch its Quest 2-style controllers, seemed to flirt with. (Previous Focus headsets were heavy business-oriented.) Other headsets from HTC person besides targeted consumers, for illustration 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 will get a free kit that includes a 5-meter USB-C cablegram pinch 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 celebrated crippled bundles.”