VEC 2019 – All the most important news from the Vive Ecosystem Conference

Yesterday for the first time I have attended the Vive Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen, China! I have been there as a speaker, content maker and as a blogger, so it has really been a crazy and interesting experience for me. I want to tell you everything that has happened there, so that you can feel as you have been there with me.

Today I will start telling you the main news from the event, and in the next posts, I will tell you how the VEC is and how it has been launching a game there.

Are you ready?

Vive Focus Plus launched worldwide for $799

The conference has begun with the classical inspiring keynote held by Mister President Alvin Wang Graylin. After having detailed his vision for a better future where we all will wear an XR headset, Alvin has started introducing HTC’s vision for the Vive Focus Plus.

The Focus Plus is being positioned as a “Multi-mode” device. This means that you can use the Focus Plus in several ways… for a total of 8:

• 6DOF Standalone VR headset to enjoy VR experiences;
• Connected to a PC via Wi-fi, you can play on the Focus+ Viveport or Steam games via Riftcat VRidge or AMD ReLive;
• Connected to a Console via StreamLink to play console games. StreamLink is a little device that you can use to connect your Vive Focus to all your consoles (Xbox, PS, Switch) so that you are able to play your games in a semi-immersive way on a big curved screen all around you. Some games are impressive when played this way;

• Connected to an HTC phone to let you see your apps like Netflix on a big screen in front of your eyes;
• Connected to the PC via Wi-fi to stream desktop content;
• Streaming 5G content of the HTC 5G hub (actually this is still experimental since 5G is a rather new technology);
• Direct streaming from Insta360 VR camera (more on this later on);
• Theater mode to see movies on a big screen in front of you.

With this multimode, HTC tries from one side to showcase the capabilities of the Focus Plus and its openness, on the other it tries to remedy to the fact that Viveport M currently doesn’t have great content. Since with the Focus Plus you can in some way enjoy also the content of your console, of your PC games and of your phone in an immersive way, you don’t have to rely only on Viveport M experiences. Honestly, I find it a smart idea for this moment, but I also think that HTC has to invest more to have more content on Viveport on the long term if it plans to fight with Oculus and its upcoming Quest.

Before officially releasing it, Mr. President has highlighted that the Focus Plus is not just a Vive Focus with two 6 DOF controllers, but it has also a better weight balancing and new improved lenses (I will tell you my impressions on the device in my next post).

And then, the moment came… the Vive Focus Plus has been officially launched on the worldwide market! The price: 5,699 RMB in China, $799 in the West. Only white color. Preorders are already open, shipping will start in mid-late April. At launch, the Focus Plus will come with more than 20 titles optimized for it.

As you can see from the price, it has been positioned in the West as an enterprise headset as all the devices by HTC. As I have said several times here, in this generation of standalone headsets, the Quest has already won in the consumer market before having been even launched. That’s why HTC is targeting the profitable enterprise niche. In China, instead, it is also being sold to consumers and this is where the multi-modality should kick in.

New Vive partnerships

Vive has announced some new partnerships. One of the most important ones, in my opinion, has been with Insta360, the immersive cameras’ manufacturer. The new Insta360 Evo camera, that is able to shoot 360 monoscopic videos or 180 3D videos, will be able to stream live content directly to the Vive Focus. This will let you see in VR what the camera is recording in a super easy way.

The other important partnership has been the one with Qualcomm. The chipset maker has announced that all the next Qualcomm chips will come with embedded pre-integration and optimizations for the Vive Wave platform. This will let Vive Wave content run more smoothly and will let us developer create more complex experiences for the Focus Plus. As a developer, I sincerely appreciate.

HTC has also partnered with the producers of “The Wandering Earth”, one of the most popular Chinese movie of all times, so that to create a branded Vive headset inspired by the movie and for the creation of dedicated VR content exclusive to Vive. This is something more targeted at Chinese people than at us Western ones.

In the end, there have been partnerships signed also with headset manufacturers like Pico and iQIYI for the Vive Wave platform.

Vive 6DOF videos

The Vive Video platform will start offering a “6DOF Lite” mode for videos. This will let the user move a bit the head while watching 360 videos and see the video moving accordingly. This is, in my opinion, a very powerful announcement, even if it has been done very fast.

What is great is that this technology works with every already existing 360 videos. This means that you will be able to move your head up to 1 meter in every direction and feel as if the video was a 6 DOF one, for an increased immersion.

This is amazing and I want to try it. Unluckily, the release date is just “soon”.

Modal

Nolan Bushnell is a VR believer and has created a startup, called Modal, that wants to help in creating large-space multiplayer experiences. This startup is a partner of Vive. It has been so great seeing the father of gaming there on the stage, so close to me…

SDK

In the afternoon session, HTC’s engineers have detailed what new features are being implemented in the Vive Focus and Vive Pro’s SDKs. Some interesting highlights are:

• Foveated rendering is being implemented into the Vive Wave SDK. The latest version (released two days ago) already implements some basic foveation features. The SDK will support eye-tracked foveation and fixed foveation (like the one of Oculus Go);
• The Vive Focus will soon have finger tracking: for every hand, you will be able to have something similar to what Leap Motion offers. Actually, since HTC has just started experimenting with this, the tracking is still not as precise as the one of Leap Motion, but it is improving. HTC is also experimenting with implementing hand gestures and actions;

• In the long run, Vive Wave will also support AR devices;
• The Vive Pro’s SRWorks framework will implement new AI features that will let the Pro understand its surroundings. The new AI.Vision module will be able to detect certain kind of objects like chairs and windows, so that you will be able to create more interesting mixed reality experiences;

• The Vive Pro will have a new SDK, called SRanipal (a horrible name, if you want to know my opinion), that will offer eye and lip tracking APIs. SRanipal will offer hardware-agnostic APIs to let for instance developers animate 3D avatars using the info from eye and lip tracking devices or offer foveated rendering thanks to eye tracking. After the event, I talked with Richard of 7Invensun, and he told me that SRanipal is great because a program made using it can work without changes both on the Vive Pro Eye and on a standard Vive equipped with the aGlass DK II eye tracking device. This kind of approach is what we developers need for VR.

Vive Cosmos?

At the booth area of the event, there was a Vive Cosmos. Turned off. Inside a closed transparent box.

During the presentation, there has been almost no mention of the Cosmos.

The impression that I got, also by talking with people of HTC, is that the Cosmos is something that will come, but not now. Otherwise, they would have at least teased something new on this device. The present for HTC is the Focus Plus… all the rest, is the future. As someone has hypothesized, maybe HTC will detail the Cosmos more after the launch of some 5G phone of its.

Hit Motion: Reloaded

I went on stage to speak about Mixed Reality for the Vive Focus and at the end of the talk, I officially announced Hit Motion: Reloaded, the first Mixed Reality fitness game for the Vive Focus Plus.

It will be one of the launch titles of the Focus Plus, the only one in Mixed Reality, and we at New Technology Walkers are so proud of having announced it. I will detail it better in one of the next posts, so stay tuned to know more about this game!

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And that’s it for now! But I have still to tell you a lot in the next posts…

(Header image by HTC)