HTC Vive Focus 3 BE in-depth review: it’s all about business

Thanks to HTC that has kindly provided me a loaner device, I have been able to test in the last days the Vive Focus 3 Business Edition. The latest standalone headset from HTC was announced a month ago, and it generated a lot of buzz in the community for its premium features associated with a high price. For this reason, in my news announcement, I defined it as “the HoloLens of VR”.

But is it truly the HoloLens of VR? Does it deliver what it promises? Is it worth its price? You will discover all of this in my very in-depth review, in which I want to answers all the questions you may have, and I want to make you feel like you have this headset in front of you and you are exploring it with me.

Are you ready?

(PS If you just want an overall “tl;dr” impression, go directly to the end of the article where I express my final opinion about it)

HTC Vive Focus 3 – Preliminary Review Video

As usual, I have also made a video with my preliminary impressions of the device. While the written article includes all the details of all the most up-to-date features, the video will show you anyway my opinion on the main characteristics of the Vive Focus 3 headset. So, if you hate walls of texts and you prefer videos, here you are something you can watch. Otherwise, go on for the full in-depth description of the HMD.

Let’s start with the written mega-review!

Specifications

• Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2
• Display: Dual RGB low persistence LCD
• Resolution: 2448 × 2448 pixels per eye (5K total resolution)
• Refresh rate: 90Hz
• FOV: 120°
• Connectivity:
  • 2x USB 3.2 Gen-1 Type-C peripheral port with OTG support
  • Bluetooth 5.2 + BLE
  • Wi-Fi 6
• Audio:
  • Dual microphones with echo cancellation
  • 2x Dual driver with patented directional speaker design
  • Privacy Mode
  • Hi-Res Certified 3.5mm audio jack output
• Ergonomics:
  • Ergonomically curved battery module mounted in the rear as counterweight
  • Magnetically-attached front gasket and rear padding with easy to clean PU leather trim
  • 150mm-wide facial interface accommodates wide eyeglasses
  • Eye comfort adjustment supporting IPD range of 57mm to 72mm
• Tracking: Inside-out, with 4 tracking cameras, up to 7m x 7m play space
• Battery: 26.6Wh, hot-swappable
• Controllers: Touch-like controllers with rechargeable battery
  • Hall sensors on Trigger and Grip buttons
  • Capacitive sensors on Trigger, Joystick, and Thumb-rest area
  • G-Sensor, Gyroscope
  • Ergonomic Grip button
  • Analog Trigger button
  • AB / XY buttons
  • System / Menu buttons
  • Joystick

Unboxing

Here you are a video of me unboxing the device, in which I also try to open a non-existing battery lid of the controllers (shame on me!).

The unboxing operation went like with every HTC headset: the hardware is positioned in the box in a very ordered way, but nothing that truly amazes or surprises you. HTC is a very practical company and doesn’t give you the pleasant unboxing experience typical of Oculus. Most people don’t care but I have a fetish for headsets that have a box designed in an original way 🙂

When you take the headset off the box, you can feel a slight scent of chemicals, but it disappears fast from the headset: it was never a nuisance to me.

The retail box contains:

• VIVE Pro 3 headset
• 2 Controllers
• Battery
• Battery charger
• Controller charging cable
• Lens cleaning cloth

I have to say that I missed a lot the “Health & Safety Guide” that I usually find inside headsets and I throw away across the room just for fun. There is not even a quickstart guide, but on the lid, there is a link to follow for the setup instructions.

Design

Regarding the design, HTC surprised me. It is probably the most beautiful headset it has ever designed, and it looks polished and classy. The glossy finish on the front face makes it look like a bulky visor of some superhero, or a guy from the Ready Player One universe.

The materials also look chosen carefully and when touched they are very solid. If you have tried the Vive Cosmos, forget that thin plastic: the Focus 3 Business Edition is very resistant. The frame is not made in plastic but in magnesium alloy, which should be 20% lighter and 500% stronger than traditional plastics, meaning that this headset could be used for many hours at work without breaking, something that is fundamental in business environments.

The only part that doesn’t feel solid are the lateral bands that comprise the crown that goes around your head. To make the headset more comfortable, HTC hasn’t made them rigid, but this makes the whole fitting mechanism wobble when you are adjusting the headband. The impression that you may have is that this could break, even if in my stress tests, it bends, but it doesn’t break.

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Let’s analyze the headset in all its parts.

On the front, you can see the glossy face of the headset, with a Vive logo in the middle. On top of it, there is a big vent to keep the computational unit cold, and a status led that usually is white or red (it’s turned off in the above picture). You can also clearly spot the 4 tracking cameras in positions that are similar to the ones of the Oculus Quest.

On the left side, you can see one of the lateral headbands with the VIVE logo on and a little cut where there is the speaker, to provide the “audio privacy” functionality. On the headset, on this side, you can see a button, but it is not the turn on/off button as I initially erroneously believed, but it is a trigger you can use to click if you are not using the controllers.

The right side is very similar to the left one, but on the headset, instead of the button, there is the USB-C port and the 3.5mm jack that you can use if you want to employ your own headphones for more privacy in your VR experience.

From the back, you can see the part of the headset that goes against your nape and that contains the battery. There is a knob that you can rotate to make the headband looser or tighter and fit it to your head. You can also see the button to turn on the headset and 4 little LEDs that indicate the charge status of the battery.

From the top, you can mainly see the headband that goes on top of your head. On the HMD there is also a tiny hole that is the secondary microphone used for noise reduction and echo cancelation for your voice. On the battery side of the device, there is a circular hole where you attach the power adapter to charge the battery. You don’t use USB-C to charge this headset, but a power adapter that is identical to the one used by the OG Vive.

From the bottom, on the headset side, you can appreciate: the main microphone that records your voice, the little wheel to set your physical IPD, the two volume up/down buttons, and the lid that hides an extra USB port. On the battery side, you can also see the button that is used to release the headband (more on this in the comfort section).

Looking at the headset inside, on the back there is a cushion that goes on your nape to make the headset more comfortable.

On the front, there is the main part of the device, with a detachable facemask, two lenses, and the light sensor. There are also two rubber wings to prevent light leaks around your nose. If you remove the facemask, on the left you can find an SD-card reader.

On the left and right headband, you can see the speakers.

Visuals

I guess you are very curious to know how are the visuals of this headset, which is the standalone device with the highest resolution, featuring 2448 × 2448 pixels per eye (5K total resolution). Actually, most probably you have already read many reviews of the Vive Pro 2, and here the optics and the display are identical to that headset, so you, like Leslie Nielsen in a famous film, “already know about this”

But in case you missed the reviews of the Vive Pro 2, let me confirm from my first-hand experience what all the other reviewers have said.

On paper, the Vive Focus 3 has astonishing visuals: 5K total resolution, 120° FOV, 90Hz. And in part, these numbers are reflected in very good visuals. The resolution is very high, the fill factor is high too thanks to the use of an LCD screen with full RGB layout. The pixel density is so very high as well, and the screen door effect just isn’t there. Someone asked me if there is a difference between the display of the Quest 2 and the one of the Focus 3, and I can say that yes, there is: in the menu of the Quest 2, I can still see something about the pixel grid in the white writings on black background. On the Focus 3, no matter how I concentrate, I can’t see the pixels. I can see aliasing, my brain can somewhat understand that it is not retina resolution, but I can’t see pixels at all. SDE bye bye.

The colors are also very good and bright. Also the blacks are dark… not as dark as in an OLED screen, but dark enough not to disturb me. The framerate of 90Hz makes everything look fluid.

And the FOV… well, 120° Horizontal are enough to give you less the impression of looking through binoculars. You may not immediately notice the upgrade when you wear the headset… but if after you have worn the Focus 3, you return to the Quest 2, you clearly notice the reduction of the FOV, and this disturbs you.

These are all the pro sides of the visuals of the Focus 3. And when things work, and you can just enjoy these pros, you think that this headset is just a pleasure to be used for your eyes. The problem is that there are also some drawbacks that haunt what could have been one of the best visual systems in a VR headset.

Let’s start from the glares: when there are bright elements in your dark scene, you see glares coming out from them. If the bright element is a big logo on a black background, you can even notice these glares highlighting the circular ridges of the lenses. HTC has chosen a dual-stacked-lens design for the Focus 3, taking inspiration from the lenses of the Valve Index, but this seems to have enhanced the optical artifacts on the visuals. The Index has glares too, but here the problem seems bigger.

The FOV is very wide, but it is not also high: when trying the Quest 2 vs the Focus 3, I’ve noticed that the vertical FOV is very similar between the two, is only the horizontal one that has a big difference. This doesn’t disturb me at all, but I hoped for also a bit more vertical field of view. The problem with the 120° FOV is that it is just nominal. First of all, 120° is the declared value: when Sebastian Ang measured the actual FOV on his Pro 2, he found these values: 117.25 deg horizontally and 96.54 deg vertically. But more than a few degrees missing, the true problem is that the peripheral part of the lenses doesn’t offer great visuals. So while on an Oculus Quest 2 you can see quite well even on the edge of the lens (a bit blurred, but that’s it), here when you look in the “extra FOV” region, you see very blurred. Add to this the fact that this headset used fixed foveated rendering that usually blurs the external part of your vision, and you obtain that the extra degrees that you have earned are actually not usable.

Don’t misunderstand me: they are nice to have, because when you look straight in front of you, you don’t clearly see your periphery, and the fact that you can at least have the perception of something is cool and increases the immersion. But if you try to move your eyes and look in that region, you become disappointed, because you see very blurred. The headset has a small sweet spot and if you find it, you love the visuals from there. But you had better not move too much your eyes, or you lose the magic. On the Valve Index, I appreciated I could move my eyes a bit and still have good visuals: this is not true for this device, where it’s better looking around by moving your head.

I also spotted a bit of chromatic aberration in the periphery of the lenses, and even weirdly in some system menus (that is, in some system dialogs, I can see the white of the writings decompose in red, gree, and blue). For the latter, I think that is a software problem due to the pre-release runtime I have used and it will be fixed soon.

All in all, the visuals of the Focus 3 are good and better than the ones of the Quest 2 or the Pico Neo 2. But it makes me angry that they could have even been better: with better lenses with fewer glares and a bigger sweet spot, this headset could have had magnificent visuals. Instead they are good, but have some issues.

Audio

Usually, the audio chapter in my reviews is very short and is like “I’m not an audio expert, and this headset has a good-enough audio that is enough for my ears” and that’s it. The only exception until now has been the Valve Index, because of its innovative off-the-ear speakers. Well, the Vive Focus 3 is going to be my second exception.

The Audio of the Vive Focus 3 is just…WOW.

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Even a person like me that has not a sophisticated ear can perceive that it has a superior quality than the one of all the other standalone devices out there. HTC was not kidding when it announced that the speakers of this device were special. When you wear the headset, the audio from the speakers is not only rich, but it also feels like it came from all around your ears. I don’t even know how to explain this sensation, I should put the Focus 3 directly on your head… it is an audio that feels immersive, that feels coming from the environment around you and not just a tiny point close to your ear. And it is special because due to the shape of the headband, the speakers are not even directly in front of my ears, but they are on top of them. I don’t know what kind of black magic it is, but I was in total awe. I loved it.

The speakers also feature another superpower: “audio privacy”, that is you can select an option in the settings of the device, and then the people around you don’t hear much of what you are listening to. The system emits towards the outside the opposite wave of the one that is going towards your ear, so people around you hear a wave and its opposite, which sum is theoretically zero. In practice, this feature works, but worse than I expected. First of all, it is not that the people around you can’t hear what you are hearing, it is that they can hear it with a lower volume. Here below you can find what my computer recorded when I was playing a music video on my Focus 3: the first part of the track is me playing music without audio privacy, the second part with audio privacy activated. (If you are curious, the song is from legendary DJ Gigi Dag and you can find it on Youtube here).

You notice that in the second part, you can still hear the audio track, albeit with a lower volume. This means one important thing: this feature is not suitable for watching porn in your workplace without other people knowing. I know that this will make the sales of the Focus 3 drop by -300%, but I had to say that. By the way, you can still do what a friend of mine does and use headphones while watching VR adult content.

The second issue of audio privacy is that the “negative sound wave” also affects slightly how you hear your audio, and so what you hear inside the headset feels less rich, it is like you could hear some frequencies less.

When listening to the reviews of the Vive Pro 2, especially the one by Sebastian Ang, you may have heard that the microphone of the Pro 2 has low quality and records audio with artifacts, especially with some letters like the “P”. Forget all of this with the Focus 3: its two microphones work very well, and the resulting audio is clean, as you can hear in this stupid test I made talking over Mozilla Hubs.

Audio is a department where the Focus 3 shined for me.

Comfort

Comfort on the Focus 3 is another mixed bag, also because of the problems with the sweet spot of the lenses.

The fitting mechanism of the Focus 3, with the top band that you can adjust with velcro and the lateral crown that you can loosen or tighten with a knob, is pretty standard and needs no further explanations. The front part of the headset can also be tilted upwards, but not downwards and this can be useful for further adjustments. There is a also a special button below the knob that makes you remove the headset easily: when you press this button, the knob loses its control on the headband, so you can make it loose or tight very fast by just pulling or pushing the back compartment. Of course, when you want to wear the headset, the final adjustments have always to be made by rotating the knob.

The problem with the crown design is that for some head shapes, like mine or the one of Road To VR’s Ben Lang, it never fits perfectly. Or better, it fits, but you need to make some continuous micro-adjustments to find the ideal position for you. And when you find it, you have to hope that your eyes are in the sweet spot of the lenses. And I’m sorry to say that this doesn’t happen with the Vive Focus 3. As I told you above, the Vive Focus 3 lenses have a little sweet spot and this means that when I have fit the headset to my head, I’m slightly off the sweet spot, so I usually adjust the headset to make my eyes see better. But if I adjust the headset this way, then it is not perfectly balanced on my head anymore. Long story short, either I wear the headset in a position that is perfectly comfortable, but my eyes are not in the sweet spot, or I put my eyes in the sweet spot, but the headset is uncomfortable (too back-heavy, too heavy on my forehead, or just making red signs on my face, etc…). Basically, the lenses are affecting not only the visuals but also the comfort.

And this is a pity because actually the headset had been designed pretty well, comfort-wise. The battery in the back makes the device perfectly balanced, and the Focus 3, when worn correctly, feels balanced as Thanos’s knife.

The front and back cushions are not made in fluffy material, because they are optimized for hygiene and durability, but they are rather comfortable to wear for a long time. The facemask is easily detachable, and the one that I’ve found in my review unit has a “W” letter on it, which most probably stands for “Wide”, meaning that there should also be a small facemask out there for people with a different face shape. Different facemasks let different users choose the one that is most comfortable for them and is important for people that have to wear a headset every day for many hours in enterprise settings. I have also made someone with glasses try the Focus 3, and the glasses fit very well, and the complaint from this person was just the sweet spot (again). According to the company, the device can accommodate also large glasses.

There is even mechanical IPD adjustment, and with a little knob on the bottom of the device, you can select the exact eye distance that makes you see better. There is no eye-relief dial, instead.

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So the headset has been designed well for comfort, but the small sweet spot may force you to wear it in an uncomfortable position.

A final caveat about this section: I am talking about MY personal experience with the comfort of the Vive Focus 3, but ergonomics are a very subjective matter, and your experience may be completely different.

Controllers

The controllers of the Vive Focus 3 look like a longer version of the Oculus Touch, and they follow the present de facto industry standard for controllers. They have a tracking ring and a handle, that is longer than the one of the Touch. There are on the top 2 input buttons (A/B), one system button, and a thumbstick. There is a grip button on the handle and a trigger you can operate on the index finger. Nothing special to say about this.

The controllers look bulky, but actually they are much lighter than they seem: when they are in my hand, they feel less heavy and more balanced than the Oculus Touch. I was pretty confused about the comparison of the weight of the controllers from HTC and Facebook, so I took a scale and measured them: one Oculus Touch weighs 144g, and one HTC Controller 145g. The weight is the same, but on the HTC controller, it is distributed better.

Keeping speaking about ergonomics, I love that the handle is covered with a rough material, so that the controllers have a tighter grip, something that is very valuable when your hands are sweating. The only problem in the ergonomics of these controllers is that the position of the index trigger is in my opinion slightly too forward, and so when holding the controllers, my index finger must stay a bit too stretched and it results always in tension. A minor issue, but I thought it was worth a mention.

The controllers have integrated batteries, exactly like the old Vive Wands, so you don’t have to mess with AAA batteries. You can charge them with a USB cable: HTC also provides in the box a cable with two USB-C plugs, so you can charge both controllers simultaneously with only one charger.

A final surprise about them: an HTC spokesperson told me they feature fingers-tracking sensors, so it is possible for developers to create experiences that have fingers tracking a la Valve Index.

Tracking

The Vive Focus Plus had some issues with the ultrasound tracking of the controllers, the Vive Cosmos had issues with the visual RGB-cameras tracking of the controllers, and many people wondered if this headset had some issues with the inside-out tracking of the controllers too (to carry on the tradition).

Well, you would be happy to discover that it is not the case: the tracking of both the headset and the controllers is good in this one. It seems that finally, HTC has nailed how to perform inside-out tracking. Thanks to the 4 IR cameras, the headset reliably tracks its position and the pose of its controllers. I have never had a tracking interruption and I used the headset both in the day and at night with artificial lighting. I have also checked its performances in low light conditions, and the tracking didn’t perform well: you need a decent amount of lighting to make this to work.

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The second question that you may be wondering is if the tracking is on par or even better than Oculus Insight, and the answer is no. It is getting there, but it is still not there. To be sure about it, I tried the two headsets one after the other, and I could spot some differences. The Vive Focus 3 headset has very good positional tracking, but it is not perfectly fluid, and you can see it making tiny tracking jumps. They are noticeable if you are looking for them, especially by watching the floor while you move. The guardian also has a visible wobble: if you move your head fast, you can see the Guardian wobbling a bit, to snap back to its original position when you stop.

The good news is that anyway with the Guardian activated, the tracking doesn’t drift: I have tried to move the headset very fast, but the virtual position of the Guardian always returned to the real position it was in the beginning, and this also held true for the virtual elements, that so kept a position coherent with the real world position I put them in. This is important news.

Talking about the controllers, I have been able to play all the applications without issues. And I’m not only talking about some slow enterprise demos but also the shooter game HyperDash and the fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded where controller speed is critical. And in fact, making some tests moving the controllers very fast, you can see that the tracking is never lost. Also making the controllers come from outside the field of view, you see no snap when they enter your vision again. This is absolutely good.

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But looking attentively, I have been able to spot some defects. If you keep your hands still, you can see that the controllers slightly move around their expected position if the controllers are in certain positions. It is barely noticeable, you have to concentrate to notice that, and it doesn’t always happen, but there is that issue, that anyway has improved a lot with the latest update of the firmware. Also if you occlude one controller with the other, the tracking of the occluded controller jumps a bit. If you put your controllers too close to your head, the tracking quality worsens too, like with all inside-out headsets.

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All in all, I’m satisfied with the tracking: as I’ve said, I had no problems with it while using the headset and I have only found problems when I have actively looked for them.

Computational power

On paper, the Vive Focus 3 uses the same chipset as the Oculus Quest 2, that is the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2, but in reality, it is much more powerful. This is because the processor in the Quest 2 has been underclocked to reduce thermal dissipation and preserve the battery, so the XR2 is not used at its full power. The Vive Focus 3 features a bigger battery and a complex active cooling system to solve both problems, so the XR2 can perform at its maximum. A redditor highlighted that according to its calculations, this means that the CPU of the Focus 3 is 2.5x more powerful than the one of the Quest 2, and the GPU 1.15x more. An HTC spokesperson commented on that post saying that the overall increment is even more than that. Anyway, these numbers give you an order of magnitude of how much the Focus 3 is more powerful than the Quest 2.

In my tests, I have seen the Focus 3 having almost no problem in executing all the demo applications smoothly, without even using an aggressive fixed foveated rendering. I have also augmented HitMotion:Reloaded by increasing the anti-aliasing level and adding some post process effects, and the framerate kept being good, while on the Quest it would have dropped faster.

This full use of the XR2 chipset comes with some drawbacks though. First of all, the battery drains quite fast, as we can see in the next chapter. Then, to keep the computational unit at the right temperature, there is an active cooling system, that is a fan. And this fan is pretty noisy, it makes the same noise as my desktop PC when I launch Half-Life Alyx… and having it attached to the head is not pleasant at all. Sometimes it also happens that you can feel on your eyes the air that the fan is blowing, and this is annoying (and quite weird) too.

The front of the headset may occasionally become warm, and you can feel warm air constantly blowing out from the sink. But internally, in the part of the headset where I put my eyes, the temperature has never gotten high or even warm, so this is not a relevant issue.

Battery

Because of the unlocked full power of the XR2 chipset, the battery of the Vive Focus 3 drains pretty fast. In my tests, it lasted something like 2 hours. It has not helped the fact that the headset doesn’t seem to have an aggressive strategy to preserve the battery: for instance, while I was playing HyperDash, I removed the headset to take a pause and I put it on my desk, but I could still hear the music coming out from it, and this meant that the system hadn’t gone completely in standby. I guess this will be improved with a future software update.

To charge the battery you don’t use a USB-C cable, but you attach a power adapter with a circular plug directly into the back of the device. It is exactly the same power adapter as an OG Vive or Vive Pro. To control the charge status of the battery, you can press the tiny button that there is on it, and the 4 little white LEDs will tell you how much power there is still in it: 4 LEDs means full charge, one only flashing led means that the battery is almost over. This indicator can be very important for LBEVR settings, so the operator can see with just a fast glance if they have to change the battery of the devices or not.

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HTC claims that the headset has a fast charge feature, and it can charge the battery from 0 to 50% in around 30 minutes. I have made a test and I have verified this claim to be true. Maybe it’s slightly more than 30 minutes, but it works exactly as advertised.

The controllers are a completely different beast. They can be charged with a USB-C cable, either attached to a power adapter or attached to the USB-C port of the headset when it is in charge. The controllers consume very little power: I charged them when I received the headset, and now the battery still sits at 50%. This is very good, because their battery is not hot-swappable, so they must survive for a whole working day before they are put in charge during the night.

Initial Setup

HTC has followed the footprints of Facebook and now also the Vive Focus 3 has a companion application, called VIVE Manager, that you can find on the most famous app stores in the West, or you can also download directly from the HTC website in China. VIVE Manager guides you step by step in all the required operations that you have to do to set up your Vive Focus 3:

• Install the battery (in the box you find the battery outside the device, and you have to install it)
• Turn on the device by pressing the turn-on button for 3 seconds
• Log in with your Vive account
• Pair the headset to the companion app
• Pair the headset to the controllers
• Connect the device to the Wi-fi
• Watch the super-boring health and safety guide

After you have completed this procedure, which is very easy and requires just a few minutes, you can finally use your Vive Focus 3. The companion app at this point is still useful to install/remove applications, reset the device, change the Wi-Fi network, and do many other operations regarding the headset very comfortably on the screen of your smartphone.

A tour of the device

Menu UI

Being an enterprise headset, the Focus 3 doesn’t have a fancy interface, but one that gets the job done. It features a nice home environment, that looks like a cozy house in Mexico, and inside it, you have a menu with four tabs: Vive Business AppStore, Library, Settings, Viveport profile. There’s no more the possibility of accessing the Android settings like in the Vive Focus Plus, and now you can only see the settings that HTC wants you to see. Looking around, I have found anyway a bit more freedom than in the Oculus Quest 2. For instance, here the user can choose if the passthrough images can be recorded/cast or not (on Quest 2 this feature is now disabled). Being a headset tailored for the Chinese market, there is also the possibility of specifying a VPN directly in the settings.

Hitting the Vive button while you are in an application, you can see a quick menu through which you can record videos and shoot screenshots, but also change some settings, or return to the initial lobby. There’s no way to kill an application, though, and this is a little issue because all applications remain dormant until you execute another one (to force close the applications, I used SideQuest).

Demos

Being an enterprise headset, there is not much to do, because you are supposed to develop the applications by yourself or buy them directly in the Vive Business AppStore. Pre-installed on my headset I have found some training applications, Viveport Video, Vive Sync, HyperDash and Mona Lisa: Beyond The Glass. The last two applications are the best that you can try: HyperDash is a fun multiplayer shooting game, and Mona Lisa: Beyond The Glass is a wonderful educational experience. Mona Lisa was an experience for PCVR, and seeing it ported so well on the Focus 3 shows once more how this device has a good computational power. The training experiences do not look very special, but they prove the use case of VR training for companies that buy the Focus 3 to test it.

Guardian

The Guardian in the Focus 3 is set in a way very similar to the one of the Oculus Quest 2. The only true difference in its setup is that after you have drawn it on the floor using your controller, the headset lets you specify what is your front direction. This is something that comes handy to decide how every game can be oriented inside your play space. Another nice feature is that together with the dialog windows with the written instructions, there is also a voice telling you what to do: this is great for accessibility, to help peple with vision impairments in setting their play area.

As with the Quest, the Focus 3 should remember every environment where you have set up the Guardian, and from my experience, after the latest firmware update, it usually works.

When you go close to the edge of your play space, the Vive Focus 3 doesn’t blend your real and virtual vision like the Quest, but it shows you a “portal” to the real world where your head is. This is a very original and also nice idea, because it is somewhat more realistic and immersive, and it breaks less the magic: it is like you are in a magical space, and you can put your head outside of it to see the real world again. The only problem with this solution is that this “passthrough portal” is completely opaque, so it hides the virtual elements that are in front of you if you are on the edge of the guardian. If you are playing an action game in a small play space, it may happen that in the middle of the action you see this big circle with the passthrough image in front of you and it is pretty confusing what is happening, also because it occludes completely the virtual elements behind it: so you may stop seeing some enemies that are killing you. I think that in a future update this portal could be made semi-transparent to solve this problem.

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Passthrough

The Vive Focus 3 has black/white passthrough vision, exactly like the Oculus Quest. It is used while you set up the guardian, or when you go out of the play area, or you can trigger it very easily by just double tapping on the system menu of your right controller. I love the passthrough shortcut on the controller, I find it very handy when I’m using VR and someone enters the room and wants to have a fast interaction with me.

The passthrough is at the Quest 1 status, that is you see all the space around you, but with a wrong scale (everything appears smaller than actually is). Even here, I guess that in future software updates, it will be fixed, exactly as Facebook did some months after the release of the Quest 1. I have to say that regarding clarity, it seems to be at a higher resolution than the one of the Quest, and also I see fewer distortions when looking at nearby objects, so I’m pretty positive about it.

At the moment, passthrough is not available through SDK. But you can at least record videoshots inside the headset when passthrough is enabled (as I did in the video above about the Guardian): Facebook removed this feature for privacy reasons, while HTC gives you an option in the system settings to enable/disable it.

SDK

Being a developer, I have also evaluated the SDK to develop solutions for the Vive Focus 3 BE. Actually, it is the same SDK with which I developed for years for the Vive Focus Plus, that is Vive Wave SDK, so I already knew it pretty well. The Wave SDK has grown a lot in the last years, and it has also added features like Foveated Rendering and Hands Tracking. If you are used to VR development, you already know that all the XR SDKs are more or less similar, and using them is usually easy, and just require to use some prefabs for the camera and the controllers and to call some system scripts. Wave is no exception, and you can learn how to use it in some days. Furthermore, it is not like when it launched some years ago, when all forums were in Chinese: now you can find an up-to-date documentation online and there are active forums in English.

As I already told you in a previous post, Wave SDK is not compatible with Unity XR and Unity Interaction Toolkit, so if you have made your application using these cross-platform plugins, porting to Focus 3 is little work. The only thing you should be careful is that if you deployed your application for Oculus and you have used an Oculus-Store compatible Manifest file in your Unity project, you have to change it to a Vive Wave compatible manifest (there is a dedicated tool to generate it), otherwise the application crashes at startup.

That’s it: I needed like 30 minutes to create a first version for Vive Focus 3 of HitMotion: Reloaded, the game that we of New Technology Walkers just launched on SideQuest. Since we made it using Unity Interaction Toolkit, the porting was super easy to do. Here you are a proof that it is working:

https://gfycat.com/leadingoblongindianpalmsquirrel

This doesn’t hold true for headsets of other vendors that are not compatible with the toolkit and so you need some more extra work to do the porting for them.

UPDATE 2021.06.25: An HTC spokesperson has informed me that with the latest version of Vive Wave it is possible to develop applications that support hands tracking. Access to camera texture for computer vision / passthrough AR is coming “sometime in the near future”

PC Streaming

It is possible to use the Vive Focus 3 also as a PCVR headset, either tethered via USB cable or tetherless via Wi-Fi (in a similar way of Oculus Link and Air Link). Streaming is offered by the Vive Business Streaming PC application, which you can find at this link. The same application handles both tethered and tetherless streaming. HTC, like Facebook, offers a special 5-meters cable optimized for streaming to PC, and you can find it on the page I linked before for €104. Streaming feature is given for free with the device: there was a misunderstanding at launch when it seemed that it was a paid feature, but it is not.

I have been able to test the tethered streaming and I had a good impression about it: it’s still beyond the Quest Link regarding some features, but it is a good start for HTC. Setting it up was super-easy: I installed the streaming application, launched it, and then I used a USB-C cable to connect my PC and my headset. The headset showed a popup asking me if activating Vive Business Streaming, I selected it, and then SteamVR was started on my PC: after a while, I could see myself in the SteamVR Home. I also tried Half-Life: Alyx to perform a deeper test.

The bad side of this tethered streaming is that its latency is higher than the one of the Link: I could clearly feel it, and especially when moving the controllers very fast making a large arc, I could feel that the visual representation was following the real position of my hands with a little delay. This also means that if you’re sensitive to motion sickness, this solution may make you feel a bit dizzy. Also it has still some bugs: when playing Alyx, if I put my head outside the Guardian, my hands disappeared from the game.

But on the good side, the system is very good at detecting the best settings for the streaming depending on your particular configuration. I have currently some problems with my graphics card overheating, and the Quest Link with SteamVR can become very choppy for me. Vive Business Streaming app detected that I was not in ideal conditions, and it downgraded the streaming quality automatically, resulting in more blurred visuals, but no problems at all in the smoothness of the application I was playing. This is absolutely good and reminded me of the same strategy that the NVIDIA CloudXR SDK follows for cloud streaming.

I have also given a try to the Wireless streaming, and I can only tell you that for sure the setup is very easy as well: if the headset and the PC are connected to the same network, the headset “finds” the PC and it connects to it. After that, you can launch Steam or Viveport games. I won’t judge about the quality of the streaming, because I don’t have a good router, and Wi-fi streaming is also in Beta. I will just say that it worked.

Wi-fi streaming will be very important in those settings like LBEVR venues or graphic studios where the users must have super-high-quality graphics but they don’t want to be tethered to a computer, not even one worn in a backpack.

Enterprise Features

The Vive Focus 3 Business Edition says in its name that it is an enterprise-oriented headset. Let’s dig into some features that make it appealing for B2B customers.

Durability

As I described in the “Design” section, the frame of the device is made in magnesium alloy, which should be 20% lighter and 500% stronger than traditional plastics, according to HTC. To prove this claim, I tried to verify the durability by knocking on the device (I hope no HTC representative is reading this…) and the device sounded rock solid. The only part that looks a bit more fragile is the crown, that as I’ve said, wobbles a bit, and may give the impression that it could detach from the headset. Anyway, in all these days, it never had a problem: it may bend, but it doesn’t break.

The controllers are quite light, but I made them collide various times, and they have also accidentally fallen off my chair and they had not even a bad sign on them, so they are resistant too (I really hope no one of HTC is reading about the bad things that happen to the devices they lend me…).

So from my experience of some days, the device looks durable according to the claims.

Hygiene

Hygiene has always been important in LBVR settings, and now during the pandemic, it is of paramount importance. So HTC has built this device with hygiene in mind, and both the face mask and the rear cushion can be removed very easily, so that they can be washed and/or sanitized (e.g. using a UVC-light emitter). They are also made in a material that is probably not the most comfortable one, but that is a good compromise between hygiene and comfort.

For instance, the Focus 3 facemask is covered in leatherette, so it feels less comfortable on the skin than the one of the Valve Index. But after I have had an intense session in Hyperdash, and I have sweated a lot (again, sorry HTC for having made this…), I noticed that the facemask had absorbed almost no sweat and I cleaned it pretty easily by wiping it with a wet cloth. When I did something similar with the Index, the mask in the end was soaking in sweat (yeah, disgusting). In an enterprise setting where multiple people have to use the same headset, you don’t want to pass the sweat of one person to another, so the choice of the material is perfect for the purpose.

https://gfycat.com/advancedadmiredgerbil

The facemask is attached through magnets and is easily detachable, and this is a pro, but also a little con because I’ve noticed that sometimes it detaches too easily even when I did not intend to. This is a minor issue by the way.

Hot-swappable battery

The battery of the Focus 3 drains quite fast, but you can change it very easily. When you notice that it is close to being discharged, you can remove it from the back cushion, put a newly charged battery in, and you are ready to go for a new 2-hours session. What surprised me is how easy is doing this operation. I mean, I made a test, and I made a full change of battery in like 10 seconds… we are like at F1 pit stop levels! (And btw Forza Ferrari). See it if you don’t believe it.

https://gfycat.com/crazytendergoldfinch

Software

HTC offers also a series of software facilities for enterprise customers:

• Kiosk mode integrated into the headset
• Device management tools (MDM), free for 6 months after the purchase of the device
• Group multi-user in-room user management system where the main host uses a tablet (useful for education scenarios)
• Users management by a device administrator
• 6 months of Vive Sync and 3 months of XR Suite included in the purchase of the device, so the customer can start experimenting with VR meetings and understand their potential

Let me copy/paste something about this from the press release

The VIVE Business Device Management System is a simple and intuitive MDM and is ISO certified, allowing IT to quickly and easily see the status of each VIVE Focus 3 on the network, remotely install new business apps, update software, and more. VIVE Focus 3 is designed to work with Android Enterprise MDM, so it can also slot into pre-existing MDM solutions already active in your environment.

Building on the success of the consumer VIVEPORT store, the VIVE Business AppStore is a curated collection of apps and tools, covering diverse areas like training, communication, visualisation, and more. It’s simple to pick an app off-the-shelf, or even get in touch with the creator to tailor it for specific needs.

VIVE Business Training is perfect to support training sessions of any size. The training leader can observe the progress of each trainee, via an Android device, highlighting the next steps needed and talking the trainee through it, even in a class size of hundreds. VIVE Business Streaming supports connecting VIVE Focus 3 to a PC via a cable, with fully wireless streaming support coming in the future. VIVE Business will see new tools and features added in the future, delivering a continuously updated powerful suite of business solutions.

I had no opportunity to test the MDM features on the field because I have not multiple devices to test them with, but I have given a look to the Vive Business AppStore and the Vive Device Management System portal.

The Vive Business AppStore is a store from which you can buy some enterprise-oriented applications: may it be for entertainment, education, training, or whatever other use. The idea is nice, but it looks a bit like a work-in-progress at the time of writing. On the headset, you can navigate the applications of the store, but weirdly, you can’t buy them: you can only buy them in the dedicated web store or the companion app. The number of available applications is also still small at the moment. I guess it will improve over time: it has just launched today, so let’s give it some time.

The Vive Device Management System is a web portal you can easily access at a dedicated website, and through that, you can manage all the headsets that belong to your organization, buy applications for your organization, manage all the users that belong to your organization (adding and removing them, defining their roles, etc…), and find the drivers and the applications to make PCVR work for you. In my short tour, I found the portal easy to be understood and to be used. Plus I have discovered that if I register a Focus 3, I get some apps for free (probably the ones I have found pre-installed on my review unit).

Enterprise-oriented services

When dealing with companies, it is important to offer services like dedicated and fast assistance, and HTC has always been very good with them on the B2B market. When you buy the headset, for instance, you get for free 24 months of VIVE Business Warranty and Services, so you are sure that whatever problem your company may have, it will be solved very fast.

Extra information

Some additional info on this device:

• There is an SD card slot hidden behind the facemask that can make the storage of your device upgrade up to 2TB;

• The device lets you shoot easily screenshots and videoshots of what you are doing in VR, but there’s no explicit way to connect it to a PC using MTP protocol, that is it doesn’t let you see the content of your device in the File Manager of your PC. To solve this problem, I activated MTP using ADB, and I was able to get some files from the Focus 3. The command line, if you are interested, is “adb shell svc usb setFunctions mtp”. I think this will be another problem that will be fixed in a future update
• On the lower part of the front face of the headset, near the IPD wheel, there is a tiny magnetic lid. Opening it you can find an additional USB-C port with OTG enabled, that can be used for additional accessories (I can imagine face tracking in the future, given its position);

https://gfycat.com/loathsomebewitchedlcont

Also HTC has just published a teardown of the device that you may find useful.

I have also shot some photos to compare it to the Oculus Quest 2 and the Vive Focus Plus. You can find them here below:

China

My readers from Mainland China would be happy to read that this device works in China, and can also be directly bought in China from HTC official website. As I’ve said, it also offers VPN integration, that could always come handy 😉

In China this headset is not only sold to companies, but also to prosumers that want to have a higher-quality VR experience.

Price

The Vive Focus 3 can be bought on HTC official website for £1060 / $1300 / €1180 / ¥9,888 + VAT. If we include VAT, the price here in Europe is for instance €1,451. This is not an affordable headset, and it has a clear enterprise-oriented price.

Final considerations

The Vive Focus 3 Business Edition is for sure an interesting headset, that adds some key innovations to standalone VR. It has an amazing design, it is made with durable materials, it has an impressive screen and a fantastic audio… not to mention all the studied enterprise-oriented features, like the swappable battery, the removable parts, or all the enterprise-oriented software ecosystem. These functionalities make it superior to all the other standalones in the market.

But, it also has some issues here and there that prevent it from exploiting its full potential: the noisy fan, the small sweet spot of the lenses, the fitting crown that may not be perfect for the shape of your head, and some glitches here and there with the software, prevent me from telling you that this is a perfect headset. Probably some more months of polishing of the hardware and the software before the release would have been a wiser choice for HTC, that had really designed an amazing device. I’m especially talking about the lenses, which have also been the most criticized part of the Vive Pro 2.

It is true that in these 7 years that I’ve been in the VR ecosystem I have not found a perfect headset yet, and not even the most expensive enterprise ones are immune to problems: Valve Index has manufacturing issues; XTAL is too heavy; Varjo VR-2 has visible lens distortions; HoloLens 2 has display issues (rainbow vision); and so on. No matter what marketing says, every headset has its shares of problems, and the Focus 3 is not immune to this. This proves that we are still in the early days, when the XR companies have to make many compromises when producing their hardware.

Honestly speaking, for €1400, I was expecting a bit more: it is the price of two Pico Neo headsets, and so I expected a device without noticeable issues. But again, the XTAL and Varjo VR-2 that I tried were worth €5000 circa, and they were not immune to problems with their lenses too. These prices for B2B are inflated by the services they are included with them, and do not respect the actual value of the hardware. Probably if this headset were sold to consumers, its price would have been well under €1000.

In the end, it is always a matter of understanding what are the pros you are looking for and what are the cons you can tolerate. The Vive Focus 3 offers a novelty of features that may be very interesting for your company (e.g. the 5K display is important for design studios, the hot-swappable battery is fantastic for LBEVR venues, the high-quality audio may be fundamental for creative people) and that you can not find in other headsets at the moment. There’s simply not an alternative, so if these features are fundamental for you, this is the device for you to buy. If they are not fundamental, and you want to be careful about the budget, then there are other devices in the market (from Pico or Oculus) that can be what you are looking for. There’s not a right answer. In my reviews I tried to underline everything, so you can make an informed decision about the purchase depending on your needs.

Should you buy it?

As always, I try to give you some insights to understand if this headset may be interesting for you or not.

Buy it if:

• You are a company, or a professional
• You can afford to spend more than €1000 on every headset
• You need the best resolution and/or the best audio in the market for a standalone (e.g. for prototyping)
• Your employees’ heads usually fit well with crown-shaped headbands (or you don’t need to make long individual VR sessions)
• You need hygiene-oriented features
• You need a durable device that can resist to a lot of physical stress
• You need to run VR for many consecutive hours (so you need swappable batteries)
• Your company may find it interesting to have a dedicated app store for enterprise to buy applications from

Don’t buy it if:

• You are a consumer: there simply are not enough applications running on this headset. Get the Oculus Quest 2 if you are in the West, or the Pico Neo 3 if you are in China
• Budget is critical for you: consider Quest For Business or Pico Neo 3 Enterprise, that cost half of this headset
• You are very sensitive to discomfort in VR: the small sweet spot may be an issue for you. The problem, in this case, is that I don’t have a valid alternative for you…. the Quest 2 is not made for comfort, and I have not tried the Pico Neo 3 to give you an informed decision. Buy a Valve Index, it is the most comfortable headset for my head (it’s not standalone, I know…)
• You are very sensitive to noise: the noise of the fan could be a nuisance to you
• You need perfect tracking of the controllers and headset: the Oculus Quest 2 is the gold standard for this, so buy a Quest For Business
• You need strong GDPR compliance: it seems to be one of the main selling points for Pico

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And that’s it! Compliments for having arrived at the end of this monster review! If you still have any questions about the Vive Focus 3 Business Edition, feel free to ask them here in the comments or on my social media channels, I would be happy to answer you.

In the meanwhile, to make me even happier, subscribe to my newsletter to receive my next posts straight in your inbox, and please donate on my Patreon so I can keep doing these long informative posts also in the future! Have a great VR day!