BARCELONA: HTC lead designer Claude Zellweger told The INQUIRER that the Vive outperforms all the competition, including Oculus Rift.
“There are different levels of immersion [with VR]. This is not me judging, it’s just an explanation of the level of the playing field,” he said.
“At the bottom you have Google Card VR, which sits on your phone and tracks your movements. It’s not a real VR experience.
“Then you have things like the Gear which sit in the middle. Then you have Oculus at the high end. We’re slotting slightly above them targeting the high end.”
HTC simultaneously unveiled the Vive at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
The VR headset is powered by Valve’s Steam VR platform and aims to create fully rendered 3D VR environments where users can interact with objects.
The Vive creates the virtual environments using two 1200×1080 displays that fill the entire field of vision with 360-degree views, according to HTC.
Tracking is provided by 30 gyro sensors, accelerometers and laser positioning sensors that can detect movements “to one-tenth of a degree” and wireless controllers that track the user’s hands.
Zellweger highlighted the Vive’s immersive hand tracking and room-scaling technologies as key differentiators for the headset.
“The main difference is we have room-scale tracking. Unlike some, where you turn your head and the whole room moves in this constricted little space, we offer a full experience that creates rooms you can move around in,” he explained.
“We’ve also created full-track controllers that are extensions of your hands. Trust me, once you get something that can track your hands and let you use them to interact with items in virtual space you get a true immersion experience.”
He added that HTC is the only company to give its VR headset a solid release deadline.
“We’re also the only company in the high-end space that has announced a shipping date. We have a strong track record of shipping devices when we say we will and we’ll do this with the Vive,” he said.
The Vive Developer edition will launch for developers at an unspecified point in the spring, with a full consumer version “by the end of 2015”.
Zellweger said that, even with this impressive tech, the Vive will need to entice developers to create applications, an area in which the Oculus Rift has had great success.
HTC has already generated interest from developers, and seen projects start for a variety of purposes, according to Zellweger.
“We don’t know how many applications are being worked on but since we announced Vive VR the phone has never stopped ringing,” he said.
“The applications go way beyond gaming. We have things like virtual travel, education, design, architecture, social interaction. Everything you can think of.
“For example, if you were a teacher in the UK who wanted students to visit the Louvre in Paris you could strap [the Vive] on and walk straight up to the Mona Lisa and see it not just in its original size, but in full detail right down to the strokes of the paint.”
Virtual and augmented reality technology is a growing focus for several technology companies. Microsoft unveiled its own HoloLens augmented reality visor in January.