Vive 3 announced, includes full cat body tracking, preorders from April 31st

I was looking on my laptop for some chinese TV Channel to strengthen my Chinese language competencies, when I stumbled on a HTC press conference. They started talking about VR, so helping myself with Chinese subtitles and with Line dictionary, I tried to do my best to understand. And it has been the most important moment of my blogger life: on this Taiwanese channel, they revealed the Vive 3. I’m sorry if I’m not able to report all the news, but I’ve got the keypoints.

Vive 3 is the new model of HTC Vive. They skipped the 2 version because the new headset will be paired with the upcoming game Half Life 3, which will be a game full focused on VR. So 3 is the magic number for VR now.

Vive 3 will completely remove the current Lighthouse tracking: Vive guys decided to substitute it with Kinect-like devices, to offer full body tracking in a complete and efficient way (like we do at Immotionar). I’ve undestood that they still have some issues in tracking the human body, but that the system works perfectly in tracking cats. So, until they’ll fix this issue, using the code that HTC has just released open-source to have full body tracking with 4 Vive Trackers, it is possible to strap 4 cats to your hands and feet to play games with your full body. Even Oculus started with some tracking problems, so i guess that’s a nice workaround.

The design is surely more elegant and resembles a bit the one of HoloLens: it’s like wearing sunglasses and you look super-cool.

There’s foveat rendering (finally) and a stunning resolution of 8K. Thanks to a method called “Foveat Minecraft Hyperbolic Reprojection” it is possible to reach 150fps even on a 486DX2 PC, with a resolution that makes you feel like everything is real. I didn’t got anything about the details of this algo, but I didn’t even understand half of the post where Carmack talks about its new reprojection method, so I guess it’s ok.

Device preorders will start on April, the 31st for only $299. This way, HTC plans to fight the upcoming cheap Windows 10 headset even on price. First preorders will ship with headset, 2 kinect-stations, 2 cats and 2 mice. You can register for having this device here. Be fast, because only 500 dev-kits are available (I’ve already preordered mine).

I’m contacting on WeChat some friends that I’ve in China to ask for more information. I’ll keep you updated! In the meanwhile, happy April the 1st! 我在开玩笑！

(Header image by vg247.it)