HTC announces full 6 DOF standalone headset Vive Focus Plus (+ thorough review on its 6 DOF controllers)

With much surprise for us all, HTC has just announced the Vive Focus Plus, its first full 6 DOF standalone headset! Do you want to know more?

Well, you are in the right place. In this article, I’m going to tell you everything I know about this new headset, plus I will give you my thorough hands-on review on its 6 DOF Controllers, that I have tried with the 6 DOF devkit.

The Vive Focus Plus

You know that I love the Vive Focus: since when I have been able to put my hands on one of them, in March 2018, I have loved playing with it and especially with the mixed reality features that I have unlocked exploiting its frontal cameras. The Focus has anyway a big flaw: it is a 6 DOF headset with just a 3 DOF controller, and that’s a pity, because the fact that it lacks two 6 DOF controllers means that you can’t have full hands presence and you can only navigate in space while pointing at objects.

At the end of 2018, HTC started solving the issue distributing to developers 6 DOF Controllers devkits, kits composed by a faceplate and two 6 DOF controllers, to let you upgrade your Focus to a full 6 DOF one. We all thought that this was in preparation of a full 6 DOF Vive Focus, and in fact, today, this kind of headset has just been announced: the Vive Focus Plus.

The Vive Focus Plus is an improved version of the Vive Focus, featuring:

• 6 DOF controllers: all the hardware of the 6 DOF controllers devkit has been embedded into the device, so now you can have an all-in-one full 6 DOF standalone headset;
• Improved comfort: the Vive Focus Plus will have a new headrest design allowing much better weight distribution, providing greatly enhanced comfort even for extended use;
• Improved optics: HTC is a bit mysterious on this, but I guess that this will mean improved lenses (lenses were one of the Achille’s heels of the Focus, as I have written in my review), or an improved display (maybe something to reduce the SDE).

The Vive Focus Plus will be sold in the West as an enterprise headset and it will have enterprise features (e.g. kiosk mode, multiple headsets management, etc…). The price is still undisclosed, but being it an enterprise device, I won’t expect it to cost below $500 for sure. Regarding the release date: somewhere in Q2 2019. It will be released in 25 worldwide markets, so it won’t be a China-only headset. Anyway, while in the West it will be sold as an enterprise device, in China it will target both enterprise customers and the mass market.

In a prepared statement, Mister President (Alvin Wang Graylin), commented the launch with:

Vive has been the clear technology leader in VR by delivering industry leading products since the launch of the world’s first room-scale Vive headset with dual hand controllers in 2016, the world’s first tracker system for physical objects in 2017, the world’s first 6dof standalone in early 2018, and now again delivering industry leading innovation with the Vive Focus Plus in 2019. The Vive Focus Plus represents a new class of full-function full-fidelity and fully standalone VR device that will enable unpresidented immersion in a portable VR device.

Alvin Wang Graylin

It’s great to see that the Focus will finally be full 6 DOF! But… what can you expect from it? I haven’t had a hands-on with the Focus Plus, but it’s almost two months that I have the 6 DOF Controllers dev-kit, so I can tell you from my experience what you can expect from a full 6 DOF Focus!

Are you interested in my hands-on review with it? Well, for sure you are…

The dev kit

The Vive Focus 6 DOF controllers devkit is aimed at giving 6 DOF controllers to HTC’s standalone headset Vive Focus.

As I have already described in my previous post with the unboxing and the installation, the kit is comprised of two parts: a faceplate and the controllers.

The faceplate is white and full of ultrasound sensors. It must be put on the Focus so that the headset can get the data of the two controllers. It features an USB-C plug that has to be inserted into the USB-C port of the Focus, so that the headset can communicate with this accessory. Since to use the faceplate you have to use the USB-C port of the Focus, the faceplate has an additional USB-C port that you can use to connect the Focus with the PC or the power outlet.

The faceplate also has a button that lets you press the power-on button of the Focus (that the faceplate covers) and a status led that turns white when the tracking is working. There is also a little hole to let you see the underlying status LED of the Focus. In the Vive Focus Plus, the content of the faceplate has been embedded into the device, so Vive Focus Plus users won’t need to know about this.

The two controllers are black and feature a long handle and a tracking ring. They seem a bit a mix of WMR controllers with Vive Wands. They work with 2 AAA 1.5V batteries.

On the top, they feature:

• 1 Touchpad
• 2 buttons (one that is like a little hill and another one that is like a little valley). The “valley” button is the system button, used to trigger the system menu;
• 1 status led.

On the bottom, they feature:

• 1 Trigger for the index finger;
• 1 Trigger for the medium finger.

It is interesting to notice that the two controllers are completely identical, so you can use anyone of them with whatever hand you do want.

Setup

I’ve already dedicated an entire article on how to install the 6 DOF Controllers devkit (It is here, in case you are interested), so I won’t go into many details here.

The installation process is quite straightforward:

1. You update the Vive Focus to the latest version possible of the runtime;
2. You insert the faceplate on the top of the Focus, inserting its USB-C plug into the port of the HMD. Optionally, you can use two screws to secure it to the headset (suggested);
3. You press the system menu button on both controllers to perform the pairing (the controllers may point to whatever direction during this process);
4. Voilà, enjoy your hands in VR!

As you can see, the process is incredibly simple. I loved the easiness of use. On the Vive Focus Plus, the first two points of the above list won’t be needed anymore, so you will only have to pair the controllers to enjoy full hands freedom.

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Since it is still a devkit, there are anyway some little issues happening here and there:

• Sometimes after the pairing, the virtual controllers still require some instants before getting in the same position and orientation of their real counterparts;
• Sometimes the pairing fails and has to be performed again (this happens especially when the batteries are not charged well);
• When the pairing is successful, the system glitches for one second before giving you full access to the two controllers;
• If the headset is connected via USB-C to the PC or the power outlet, the tracking doesn’t work.

These are no big deals, but can anyway be a little nuisance. With the Focus Plus, being everything embedded into the device and working it natively with two 6 DOF controllers, I guess that these issues will not be present anymore.

Comfort

The comfort of the two controllers in the hand is not bad at all and the hands fit well around them. They are also quite light and the fact that they can be used by whatever hand is for sure a plus.

Anyway, I find the overall design of the controllers having some little issues regarding where the buttons have been placed. The touchpad is perfect to be used by the thumb, and the index trigger is exactly where it is meant to be placed. But the additional two buttons below the touchpad require an unnatural pose of the thumb to be pressed and the secondary trigger actioned by the medium finger feels uncomfortable to be used. I think that these buttons could have been designed better. If you design a game for the Focus Plus, I advise you to let the player use the index trigger and/or the touchpad most of the time. Leave the other buttons for actions that have to be performed rarely.

Tracking

The 6 DOF controllers of the Focus surprisingly work with ultrasonic tracking. I was quite skeptical when I read about it, but actually, when I tried them, I have to say that I discovered that the tracking is indeed quite good. It works even when the controllers cross each other and thanks to some black magic by HTC (that involves IMU data for sure), the controllers are tracked even when they are slightly behind the head. I have developed a Unity program where the controllers left a trail behind them… and when I drew stuff behind me, I then noticed that the trail was more or less like what I tried to draw with my hands. That’s impressive.

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I guess that now you would like to know about the tracking quality. Well, it is good, but not perfect: it is of course not comparable to the almost-perfect SteamVR tracking v2, but it is more or less comparable to the one of a WMR headset… maybe a bit worse at the moment that we are in a dev-kit stage. The real problem is that the controllers jitter a bit when you hold them in your hands. If you keep your hand steady and look at the controller in VR, you will see that it trembles a bit. And the more the hand is distant from the headset, the more the amplitude of this jitter is noticeable. That’s rarely a nuisance from a practical side in VR (unless you are drawing something with great accuracy), but it is something that has to be fixed. If this gets fixed, I can say that the tracking will become as the one by Microsoft. I guess that for when the Vive Focus Plus will be officially released, the jitter will be reduced.

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Regarding reliability, the controllers very rarely lose tracking. I made some tests moving the controllers fast, crossing them, doing crazy things with them and the tracking was not lost. I was really impressed by the reliability of tracking.

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The rare times that one of the controllers lose tracking, it is usually because you have really crossed them in a weird way (maybe too fast and too close) or because one of the controllers went really too below your head. I’ve in fact noticed that while the horizontal FOV is really good, the vertical FOV has some more limitations if the controller is far away from the headset. I have made a test, putting one of the controllers on my foot or on my leg (yes, I am crazy), because I wanted to experiment with full body VR, but the system couldn’t track it. This means that if the controller is too below and distant from the headset, the tracking at first becomes unreliable and then it gets lost. Anyway, don’t misunderstand my words: the vertical FOV is good… I would have just preferred some more tracking freedom.

The last thing to talk about is latency: the tracking is smooth and fast, but there is anyway a slight delay in tracking. It is very very little, but it is there. So, your brain can perceive that the response is not immediate, but it is so little that it can’t quantify the amount of such delay. Again, I hope that when the Vive Focus Plus will be released, the tracking will be faster.

When I shared the video of the 6 DOF Controllers in use to play Beat Saber, a lot of people complained about the big perceivable delay of the controllers in the video. Trust me, it is not that big… in that video, there was the additional delay of using Riftcat VRidge to use the Focus to play SteamVR over Wi-fi. The latency is really a lot less perceivable.

Battery

I can’t tell exactly how much battery life the controllers can guarantee, but I can tell you that they are consuming quite a lot of batteries to me. They need batteries with high charge levels, otherwise they start functioning worse (e.g. the pairing process becomes problematic). Since in the office I only have some cheap batteries, I am changing the batteries more often than I hoped for. My advice is buying high-quality high-charge batteries for these controllers.

Development

Developing for the two 6 DOF controllers is super-easy. If you already use Vive Wave SDK, you can continue to use your traditional development flow, since the Wave SDK already supported two controllers. I was afraid of how implementing them, while it was actually ridiculously simple. I just added two controllers to the scene instead of one and I was ready to go.

Other

As I have detailed in a previous article of mine, it was very interesting to play Steam games with the Vive Focus thanks to Riftcat VRidge. I could play all games from my PC, with full hands presence, with the full freedom of using no cables, thanks to Wi-fi streaming. Of course, there is an added latency and there may be visual artifacts, but it also shows us how the future will be when we will be able to use devices that exploit the computational power of a PC (or the cloud) while giving us the full freedom of a standalone headset.

Final judgement

After having used it for some weeks, I can say that the 6 DOF Controllers for the Vive Focus are currently a good dev-kit. They suffer from some little flaws, but due to the current status of the project (still unreleased), this is something to be expected and that will be surely fixed in the final version that will ship with the Vive Focus Plus.

In general, I really loved the possibility to use both my hands with a standalone headset… it is fantastic. And I am happy that HTC is incorporating this feature in its new standalone headset. Playing with full 6 DOF is a real sensation of freedom, and I am really enjoying playing and developing for it in my office…

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I hope that you have enjoyed reading this post, and if it is the case, please send me a virtual hug since I have written it with a high fever 🙁