Vive Focus enter version 2.0 at VEC 2018

“Hold my beer”: this is what the Vive Focus has told to all other standalone headsets yesterday at the Vive Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen. The headset has taken a big step forward with the 2.0 update, that introduces so many features that now it completely justifies its high price of $500-$600. The Focus is now ready to become the best standalone headset for all prosumers and enterprise.

You may wonder why I am saying this: well, spend some minutes to watch this video and you get immediately the reasons.

Have you seen how many new features? It is jaw-dropping. Let’s just examine them one-by-one.

Better screen mirroring

Let’s start with something easy: do you remember my article on how to stream the content of the Focus on an external screen? Well, Vive is improving this process and now when you use Miracast you won’t see anymore the distorted image of the two eyes, but only a non-distorted one. It is a square one, so it seems that the system takes the undistorted view of one eye, exactly as the Oculus Go does when recording a video. This is a handy feature for sure because allows external people to have a clear image of what the VR user is seeing.

From my tests, the image on the screen appears slightly distorted, so there will be something to fix on HTC’s side.

Better integration with HTC phones

Yesterday HTC has also unveiled its new flagship phone, the HTC U12+. Actually, it is a cool device, with a total of four cameras, a nice design and some interesting gestures. Since now the VR and smartphone division of HTC have been somewhat unified, the teams developing the two devices have collaborated to make the two devices collaborate (it’s like a tongue twister).

This means that:

1. There will be a companion app for the Vive Focus on the HTC phone, that will let the phone interact with the VR headset. It will be available shortly on HTC official app store and Tencent app store;
2. When you will receive a phone call or message on your HTC phone and you are in VR, that notification will be pushed automatically to your headset, so you can answer calls even when you are in VR. This is a great feature, even if I think that to be really great it has to be properly tuned with the companion app: while doing demos with my Gear VR, that automatically shows the notifications of my Samsung phone, I was really afraid of what my friend could send me. Has happened various times that during some internal VR demos, my colleagues could read the excerpt of the messages that I received and told me stuff like “Ehi, there is this girl that says that for tonight it is ok! Great job, Tony!”. How embarrassing. I think that tuning the kind of notifications to receive through the companion app is fundamental for professionals;
3. You will be able to stream your Android phone apps from your U12+ phone to your Vive Focus. You may wonder why you would want to do this: well, to have a bigger screen. Watching a movie from your Netflix app or playing some kind of games on a big screen in VR can be far more interesting than seeing it on a little device: you can feel yourself as being in a cinema. This is also an answer to Lenovo Mirage Solo, that lets you directly install apps from Google Play.

This integration is surely interesting: I don’t think that it is a killer feature, but for sure the fact that there is an integration between the device that currently manages our lives (the smartphone) and the device that will manage them in the following times (the XR headset) is worth having. I really hope they’ll offer it to all Android phones and won’t keep it only for the HTC phones.

I’ve tried to test this functionality today: the Focus is already ready for it, but the Vive app on the phone still looks for a PC to pair with… as I’ve told you before, we have to wait to use it.

Awesome controllers

The Vive Focus has inside-out 6DOF tracking but has only a damn 3 DOF controller. Well, actually, I should say “had”.

6 DOF controller emulation

Thanks to some computer vision and artificial intelligence magic, the two cameras of the headset can now somewhat track the hand holding the controller and understand its position in space. This resembles a lot a feature that Google was researching and that was shown by Road To VR… so it seems that sooner or later all 3 DOF controllers will become 6 DOF ones.

HTC has finally managed to develop this feature, also thanks to some low-level tweaks that now allow to properly manage the computational resources of the device, and let run the positional tracking of the headset and the positional tracking of the controller (both very heavy operations) in parallel in an efficient way. This means that the tracking of the controller can now be fast and reliable enough to be released to the Vive Focus users. The coolest part is that this means that without changing the current 3 DOF remote, I will have a 6 DOF remote for my Focus! WOWOWOWOW!

This feature has been teased, but it has not been released yet (it should arrive in Q3 of this year)… I guess that’s because it still needs some refinements. Furthermore, I think: if they manage in doing this for one controller… why can’t they make it work for two? So, I imagine that in Q3, maybe in the same period when Oculus will announce the Santa Cruz, the Focus could have two 6 DOF remotes as well… but it is all a speculation of mine, don’t trust it :). Even if, considering that the gesture recognition software of the Focus will work for both hands…

Of course, while I am excited, some problems remain: first of all, the controller is just a remote, while Oculus Santa Cruz has more ergonimic controllers; then, I guess that the 6 DOF tracking will work only when the hand is more or less in front of the device, in a similar way to how WMR headset controllers work. It can’t track your hand while it is near to your back, because your hand should be in the field of view of the cameras… we have to see how big is the FOV of this tracking. Furthermore, the accuracy has to be evaluated… hand tracking is damn hard and we don’t want our virtual controller to jitter. So, there are some caveat… we’ll see how well it will work in Q3 of this year. In the meanwhile, I am very happy with this news, a 6DOF controller is what a 6DOF headset needs.

You can see the current status of 6 DOF emulation implementation in the below video by HTC: as you can see, it works, but it still needs some refinements.

This is IMHO the bomb news n.1 of this event.

Your hand is the controller

Why using a controller when you can use your hands? The magic computer vision algorithms can roughly track both hands and so can also detect rough gestures. This means that you can for instance scroll through a catalog by just waving your hands in front of the device. This hand tracking is very rough, so do not expect a Leap Motion-type interface, but it can be good for some VR applications. It is an enabling technology and us developers have to understand how to use it in our applications.

This gesture SDK will be released to registered Viveport developers in the coming weeks, so to allow devs to create interesting applications with it. Later on, maybe in Q3, it will be released to all users.

Your phone is the controller

Since the phone is a 3DOF-tracked device with a huge touchpad… why don’t use it as a Vive Focus controller? This is what HTC has thought when it has implemented the possibility to use your HTC phone as an additional controller. In the video at the beginning of this post, you can see a guy using the phone as a second controller for the game he is playing.

I don’t think that using the phone as a standard controller in action games is a great idea, because it is big to be held in the hand and if accidentally you smash it against something while you are in VR, you have a great problem… but again, it is an enabling possibility for us developers. I find far more interesting the possibility to use the huge touch screen of the smartphone as a way to interact efficiently with VR experiences. I think that HTC has had the exact same idea of mine because Mister President Graylin showed a video where he used the phone to play the guitar in VR with some cardboard guitar controller. Very cool.

AR/MR mode

Do you remember the pass-through mode of the Gear VR? Well, with the Vive Focus you can have something similar called “Surroundings mode”… and it is even better, thanks to the two cameras. You just have to double tap the power button of the Vive Focus to see your surroundings with both eyes and so do short tasks like sending an SMS or drink a glass of water without the hassle of removing your headset. This is very handy… also to do some crazy stuff like running on the streets with the Vive Focus on 🙂

As you can see from the video above, I’ve tested this feature in the office and it is pretty cool. To use it you have to update the Vive Focus to the latest version (it requires a bit of time to download this update) and then you have to enable the Surroundings mode in the Developers Options of the device (you find them in Menu -> Settings -> More Settings). The problems of this pass-through mode are:

• The images are all in black and white;
• It shows a lot of visual distortions that make my eyes feel a lot of fatigue;
• There’s a bit of lag and some little framerate problems.

This means that HTC has still to work a bit to make this feature fully usable.

Since now we have this pseudo-AR mode, I guess (but again, this is a speculation), that on the Focus could come some mixed-reality functionalities like the ones that there are on the Vive Pro with the SRWorks SDK. I guess that Vive people are trying to make the porting for the Focus and maybe launch it in Q3 along all the other cool stuff.

Riftcat integration

The bomb feature n.2 announced yesterday is that now there is a specially optimized version of Riftcat VRidge for the Vive Focus, so you can play all Viveport and especially all Steam VR games on your Focus headset! HTC advises using this in a modern 5G Wi-fi local area network to have proper visual quality.

This is awesome for the following reasons:

• Finally, we can play a lot of cool games on the Focus! Currently, Viveport M(mobile) is an unripe ecosystem and there are few apps and most of them are Chinese ones. With Riftcat we’re now able to play all games on Steam with the Focus. Of course, there may be problems with the visual quality of the streaming and with the controlling schema (the Focus has only a 3 DOF / 6 DOF remote, while games on Steam VR usually require two 6 DOF controllers), but this is very empowering nonetheless.
• The Focus becomes the first VR headsets that can work both as a 6 DOF standalone headset and a 6 DOF PC headset. You can use it to play SteamVR games on PC and then also use it to watch a movie while you’re on a train.
• This allows a lot of new experimentations: if the headset can be connected with SteamVR, does this mean that I can use it with Vive Trackers? And Vive Controllers? Once I saw a video of a guy using the Samsung Odyssey headset with Vive wands controllers in SteamVR… maybe in the future could be possible to use the Vive Focus with Vive wands controllers!

Of course, I’ve tested it as soon as I could, using the 2.0 version of the runtime of the Focus. In the video above you can see the results: when it works, it works very well, with the Vive Focus controller that appears as a 3 DOF Vive wand and so lets you play SteamVR games. As you can see, I’ve had a lot of glitches and this has happened mostly because I’ve not tested it in the ideal conditions with 5Ghz Wi-fi network and such. So, if you are not in the ideal conditions, it doesn’t work very well. But if you are in the right conditions, it can be a very interesting solution.

If you want to test it by yourself, I give you some pieces of advice on the process you should follow, to avoid you some headaches:

• You have to download Riftcat special version for Vive Focus: if you try to use plain RiftCat 2.0, it doesn’t work. You get it from here. Notice that there is a bug in the installer, so if you try to specify another installation directory for the Focus VRidge to install it alongside the standard Riftcat VRidge, it will install the Focus version in the standard install directory the same;
• You have to download Riftcat VRidge on the Focus from Viveport M;
• If you have SteamVR beta version, DON’T USE IT or nothing will work (at least this happened to me). Go to Steam and set it to work with SteamVR stable branch;
• Launch the Riftcat apps on the Focus and on PC;
• Hit play on Riftcat;
• Configure SteamVR room;
• Play in VR!
• If you experience some problems, like the above glitches, play around with Riftcat VRidge parameters… to me this helped in having a more usable streaming.

Passenger Mode

If you want to use your Focus just to watch a movie as if it were an Oculus Go, the device doesn’t need to perform continuously the 6 DOF tracking… it is just a waste of resources. This is why you can activate now on the Focus the “Passenger Mode” that lets you use your Focus as a simple 3 DOF headset. The advantage? The battery duration: you have 33% more battery life… the Focus can last up to 4 hours in this mode (according to some internal tests, even 5 hours if you play 1080p movies in Vive Video), enough to let you survive during a boring travel. This is a smart idea.

HTC warns that apps have to be recompiled with the newest Vive Wave SDK if they want to exploit Passenger Mode benefits.

I’ve tested this feature as well: if you upgrade your runtime, you find it in the Developers options of the device (you find them in Menu -> Settings -> More Settings). It works like a charm, but I can’t tell if it actually improves battery life because I’ve not tested it for much time (I hate 3 DOF!).

VR Power Drive

Thanks to a partnership with HTC, the famous company Seagate has announced the “VR Power Drive”. The Power Drive is both an external storage of 1TB and a power bank with a battery of 5,000mAh. It has been optimized so it is plug and play with the Vive Focus and has also a clip to secure it at your belt and wear it comfortably. 1 TB of additional storage for your multimedia elements and a battery that can almost double the lifetime of Vive Focus means a lot if you plan to use your Focus to watch movies during long travels or if you have to do demos.

Vive Wave SDK advancements

HTC has announced its roadmap for the Vive Wave SDK (the one used for the Vive Focus): in the upcoming times, it will add cool stuff like eye tracking, 6 DOF controller emulation and other stuff like that. What I loved to know is that in some months they’ll add the Instant Preview feature for the Vive Focus, that is the ability to test a Unity project in the Vive Focus without building and deploying it, just with some streaming magic. This feature is fundamental for us developers because it makes us save ages of time while developing stuff and I’m very happy that they’ll implement it.

If you remember well, I’ve implemented a prototypical version of it on my own and then asked HTC Vive to carry on my work: I like to think that they have announced it because of me (and if it is not true, please don’t tell me 😀 ).

Other updates

Playing around with version 2.0 of the Focus runtime, I’ve discovered various little improvements: for instance, the lower menu of the home is now better positioned; the remote has now a left-handed mode; the Screencast option can be found easier and so on. Various little improvements that added up make the experience on the Focus better.

Other news

Other relevant Vive-related news announced yesterday:

• The Focus now can install the apps directly on microSD cards (up to 2 TB) so that you can worry less about the internal storage problems when you download your VR experiences;
• Viveport M now lets you play with all most important credit cards providers: this means that wherever you live, you can buy content on Viveport (this is another sign of a future worldwide launch of the Focus);
• Oasis Beta VR application will get new features like “Avatar Creator” and “Social Area”;
• Vivedu showed the potential use of Vive Focus in classrooms with a project called “Vive Focus Classroom” that supports the teaching from a single teacher to up to a hundred of simultaneous students in a collaborative VR environment. I’ve gone to school in the wrong years;
• HTC has announced a partnership with MLB for future collaborations in China;
• HTC has partnered with McLaren to jointly produce VR products (like a McLaren-themed Vive Focus) and AR/VR-targeted contents. This means that most probably we will soon be able to see some Formula 1 content inside the Focus headset! Wow.

  

Furthermore, the epic Enea Le Fons (the man of #30DaysInVR) has been able to speak in front of such an important audience: he’s talked about his 30 days in VR experience and has announced its new adventure: #7DaysInVR! Do you want to know more about this? Then stay tuned…

As you can see… from today, when the 2.0 Update to Vive Focus has been released, to Q3 of this year, when we’ll have all the announced features (e.g. 6 DOF controller and hand interactions), the Vive Focus will take a huge step forward. Without changing the hardware, the device directly goes to a 2.0 version, with a lot more features and a lot more possibilities for us developers and for the users. I sincerely compliment with Vive for the great work they’ve made! 辛苦了

You may ask if this changes something in the choice you have to make between Oculus Go and Vive Focus and in my opinion, the answer is no: the Go and the Focus are two completely different devices, with two different target markets. Even if the Focus has improved, it remains a prosumer product and not a consumer one like the Go. What changes is the comparison between the Vive Focus and the Lenovo Mirage Solo: Google has to answer to Vive, otherwise it will lose all the enterprise sector.

Now sorry but I have to play a bit with my new Focus 2.0! Have a nice day (and please subscribe to my newsletter!).

(Header image by HTC)