The most interesting hands-on demo I had at MatchXR in Helsinki was with the HTC Vive team, who let me try two of their most important solutions: the new Vive Focus Vision headset and the Viverse social VR space. I think these two products may be relevant for some enterprise use cases. Let me explain why in this hands-on article!

[As usual in these cases, I care about reminding you that this is a “hands-on” article and not a “review” because I just spent like 15 minutes with the headset on. This is enough time to get a first impression of it, but absolutely not enough for a detailed review. For this reason, take everything written in this article with a grain of salt]

Vive Focus Vision

Vive Focus Vision is the latest standalone headset launched by HTC. From its list of features, it is clear that it is a device that has been thought of with PCVR streaming in mind. The Focus Vision, in fact, introduces a feature that got a lot of attention when Pico launched it, that is DisplayPort connection to the PC for uncompressed PCVR. Despite the introduction of this feature that was desired a lot by the PCVR people, its launch had a lukewarm reception from the VR community, because the headset is pricey (I mean, it has an “HTC price”) and it supports a somewhat confusing list of features. In the remainder of this article, I’ll try to put some clarity around the purpose of this headset, and also give you my first impressions about it. But first things first, let me start by telling you its specifications.

Specifications

This is the list of the main specs, courtesy of Road To VR:

• Display
  • Resolution: 2,448 x 2,448 per-eye
  • Technology: 2 x LCD displays
  • Refresh Rate: 90Hz
• Lenses: Dual-element Fresnel
• FOV: 120° horizontal
• Chipset: Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1
• RAM: 12GB
• Storage: 128GB (expandable via MicroSD to 2TB)
• Connectors: 2 USB-C (1 with DisplayPort Alt mode)
• Battery Life: 2 hours (hot swappable with 20-minute internal battery)
• Tracking: 4 front-facing tracking cameras and infrared floodlight for illuminated hand tracking
• Controllers: Vive Focus 3 controllers, rechargeable battery
• Audio: In-headstrap speakers (dual driver), 3.5mm aux output
• Microphone. Dual microphone
• Pass-through Cameras: 2 RGB Cameras (16MP) w/ Depth Sensor
• Automatic IPD adjustment: Mechanical via eye tracking

The purpose behind this device

While I was trying the device at the HTC booth, I had the opportunity to chat with some people from the company, and I basically asked them a question that can be summarized by this meme:

via GIPHY

I mean, why release a new headset that still has the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chipset? And in general, why release a new headset that looks so much like the Vive Focus 3? And why releasing a standalone that is mainly made for PCVR and not releasing directly a PCVR headset?

People from HTC Vive were very kind in answering my questions and my general understanding after this chat is that the Vive Focus Vision is basically just a refresh of the Vive Focus 3 to add to it a few features. It is a bit of what Pico did with the Pico 4 Ultra, which is a (great) mixed reality refresh of the Pico 4. The problem is that HTC did not call it Vive Focus 3 Plus or Vive Focus 3.1, but Vive Focus Vision, creating a lot of different expectations, also because the name reminds me a bit of the Apple Vision Pro, so it seems we should expect an Apple competitor. If you see this headset as a new flagship headset by Vive, it makes very little sense. For instance, it makes no sense that it still has a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 as a chipset in 2024. But if you see it from the point of view of a refresh of a previous headset, it makes much more sense. As you will read in the remainder of this hands-on article, many of the features of this headset are very similar to the ones of the Vive Focus 3, which was a very good headset, as I’ve written in my detailed review in this other post.

Coming back to the “why” meme with which I started this paragraph, I asked HTC why they decided to release this update of the Vive Focus 3. I have been told that HTC is very strong on the enterprise side and also in location-based entertainment and there have been people in these sectors who were satisfied by the Focus 3 but were asking for some specific updates so HTC has updated the device for these specific niches. Let’s take the example of the hot-swappable battery feature: it is useless for at-home usage (most people do not have two batteries for their headset), but it is crucial to guarantee uninterrupted service in LBVR arcades. I’ve been told that actually, HTC’s customers are pretty happy with this new device because it incorporates a lot of features they were in need of. So yes, this headset may have some appeal for people needing at home a headset that supports eye tracking and Vive Trackers, but most of its audience is actually on the enterprise side. I think this should have been communicated properly when the headset was launched, instead of keeping the usual confusion between enterprise and consumer markets that has been haunting the communication by HTC in the last times.

As for why they didn’t launch a new PCVR headset if this standalone headset is actually optimized for PCVR usage, I’ve been answered that all PCVR headsets by HTC use SteamVR tracking, and they wanted to provide an inside-out solution. I was going to answer them that they could have done an inside-out tracked PCVR headset, but then I recalled that the only PCVR headset with tracking cameras that HTC ever released was the Vive Cosmos and that moment I realized that maybe keeping the standalone form factor was the best idea possible…

Design

The Vive Focus Vision has a classy design, made even better by an elegant black color. It seems well-manufactured and solid. According to my previous review of Focus 3, “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”. This is pretty cool

The front plate is glossy and this makes everything even more elegant. For this reason, to me is pretty confusing they went for a placement of the cameras that results in a “funny face” with two eyes and a “surprised mouth”. I appreciate fun, you know, but I think that either you go for the elegant route or you go for the funny route. Making a mix of the two is not a great idea in my opinion, and I think the funny face ruins a bit the elegance of the headset, but this is a personal choice.

Here you are a set of pictures from all the points of view:

Comfort

The headset feels on the head a lot like the Vive Focus 3. It is pretty bulky and rather heavy, but it is also very balanced, so it feels pretty comfortable on the head. The cushions on the facemask and the nape are pretty comfortable, too. Unluckily I’ve not been able to have the device on my head for a long period, so I can only testify that it is quite comfortable to wear for a limited time.

The device features automatic mechanical IPD adjustment, with the lenses adapting to your eyes’ position thanks to eye tracking. The first time I used this headset, the IPD adjustment failed and I had a very unpleasant couple of minutes where my eyes were crossing to compensate the wrong setting. Removing and re-putting on the headset solved the issue. Automatic IPD is very handy when it works.

Visuals

Vive Focus Vision mounts the same display and lenses as Focus 3, but they were already so advanced, that they still look very good today. With 2448×2448 pixels per eye, it is still beyond the Quest 3 (which has 2064×2208 per eye) in terms of resolution. With this great resolution, the screen door effect was not visible, it was just a “noise sensation” I could see in the images.

The field of view is pretty large: 120° horizontal is quite a lot. I have to say that anyway the horizontal peripheral area of the lenses was haunted by visible spherical aberration, so it is better that you look straight when wearing this device. Surprisingly, on the vertical side, the lenses did not show the same artifacts. Lenses anyway are still Fresnel, and this brings a collection of issues that we VR people know very well: godrays, glares, etc…

All in all, I would say that if you look straight, the visuals on the Focus 3 are definitely very good.

Audio

From my limited time, I can only say that there is integrated audio and that it works. Having tested the headset only with Viverse, I can not judge much on the quality of the different frequencies of the speakers. But this headset is an update of the Focus 3, and I guess that the speakers are the same. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the speakers when I tried the Focus 3, so I guess this holds the same for the Focus Vision.

Controllers

The controllers of the Focus Vision are the same as the Focus 3. For this reason, they feel a bit bulky for 2024, especially because they still feature the tracking rings, which have nowadays been removed by most of the other standalone headsets. They have a decent comfort.

Controllers feature the standard control scheme (grip button, trigger button, thumbstick, A-B buttons, system button) and this is good for cross-platform compatibility of the supported applications.

Here are a few photos of the controllers, so that you can have a look at them.

Tracking

The inside-out tracking of the headset works flawlessly and so it is for the controllers. I have not been able to test eye-tracking in detail, so I can not report on this one.

Passthrough

Mixed Reality is one of the most important new features of this new headset, and HTC delivers it with two cameras installed on the front plate of the device. The passthrough quality is pretty good, better than I expected, but not at Vision Pro levels. It is good that the passthrough is stereo, and also in my tests, it showed almost no distortions: I tried to put my hand close to my face and I did not see some weird artifacts as it happened with the Quest in the beginning. I could still perceive a slight lag in the passthrough, though: I tried to walk with the headset on, and I had to be careful with my movements because the slight lag in the passthrough perception was making my coordination more complicated.

I think that on this side, HTC worked well.

PCVR

Another one of the most important features of this headset is lossless PCVR thanks to the Displayport connection. That is, the headset connects directly to the Displayport of the PC, and it acts as a PCVR headset, without any compression that is instead present when you connect a standalone headset via USB.

Since the feature is so important, I guess you want to hear my opinion about it. And trust me, I would like to hear my opinion, too. But people of HTC there did not have the proper cable to test this functionality so I could not try it. HTC people, you had one job…

(If you want to read a detailed hands-on article on PCVR usage of Vive Focus Vision, I suggest you read David Heaney’s review on Upload VR)

Computational power

Vive Focus Vision surprisingly still features a pretty old chipset, which is the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen1. I think this is pretty limiting in terms of performance, and in fact, during my tests with the headset, I had some framerate issues with Viverse a couple of times.

Price and availability

The headset is available in all regions where HTC operates, priced at $1000. Its steep price reflects its enterprise focus.

The adapter to connect the headset to the PC for lossless streaming is available for $150, but it is given for free with the headset during some promotional sales (e.g. it was gifted during the preorder period).

Final Considerations

When I tried the Vive Focus 3, I described it as a very good enterprise headset, so I can only express a similar opinion about this device, which is a refresh of the Focus 3, improving it with mixed reality, eye tracking, lossless PCVR connection, and hot-swappable batteries. It seems that HTC has fulfilled the needs of its customers with this device, going to add to the Focus 3 the most requested features. This is for sure a very practical approach.

But still, my review of the Vive Focus 3 was from 2021, and in three years many things have changed in the ecosystem: for instance, headsets have gotten smaller, and we have much more powerful chipsets. The Focus 3 in 2024 while still rocking on some sides (e.g. resolution and field of view), feels old on others (e.g. chipset). Considering also the high price of the headset, it’s hard to suggest consumers to buy this headset: on the PCVR side, the Pimax Crystal Light seems a more reasonable choice, while on the consumer side, Quest 3/3S seems the way to go. But on the enterprise markets, for existing customers of Vive, the Focus Vision may still be a very good headset for their specific niches.

As a VR enthusiast, I’m more interested in what may be the next-gen headset from Vive, the Focus 4 (or whatever its name will be). Remember that when Qualcomm in January announced the powerful Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2, it also stated that it would have been integrated into a to-be-announced HTC headset. Well, HTC, I’m waiting for this announcement…

via GIPHY

Viverse

I had my demo of Vive Focus Vision by running Viverse For Business, which is the social VR platform for enterprise by HTC (once upon a time, I would have said “enterprise metaverse platform”, but now it is forbidden to use the M-word). The initial communication that HTC did about Viverse was very confusing, and it led me to think that it was a mix of Engage, VRChat, and Vive Sync, with some Web3 flavor, a bit for consumers, and a bit for the enterprise. But after the hands-on, I have a clearer idea about it being a proprietary enterprise multiplayer VR platform.

Viverse For Business hands-on

I would say that from my hands-on, it results that Viverse is an evolution of the old Vive Sync, which also takes heavy inspiration from ENGAGE (a company in which HTC is an investor).

The look and feel is good, but being a professional platform, it doesn’t feature any bold or bright elements, so it looks elegant, but also a bit flat. The avatars are good-looking, though, and since they can be created starting from a picture, they resemble pretty well the people they represent.

In Viverse, you can do everything you do in a social VR space: you move around, you speak with people, and you can teleport to various locations. There are portals that when clicked, teleport you inside a new space, and this is not only useful to teleport you to a totally different place but also to make you enter a new room so that when you enter the room, you have a scene with just the room and nothing more, so that your headset doesn’t have to keep in memory also all the space that is outside it.

The platform is meant for enterprise use, so it is possible to host presentations and watch videos together. But one of the main use cases is examining 3D models together: for instance, the stakeholders of an airplane company from all over the world may use it to gather virtually and discuss a new engine together. The usual problem is that these 3D elements to be discussed are usually very heavy to render because of the huge number of polygons they feature and that are not suitable for a standalone headset like the Focus Vision. Here Viverse takes a very smart approach to solve this issue, which is polygon streaming. We all know about pixel streaming, which is rendering a complex scene on a server and then streaming the rendered scene as a live video to the headset that just shows the rendered frames. This technique works, but requires a costly remote server and also a very large bandwidth of your network, or the result is in potato quality. With polygon streaming, the rendering happens locally and the remote server only streams the polygons that the client has to render, hiding from the client the complexity of the whole scene. This is more efficient and less expensive than pixel streaming and from my early tests, the quality is pretty good. I’ve been shown a huge motor model inside Viverse, it was very detailed, and clearly impossible to render on a standalone headset as is, but it was there, fluidly rendered in front of me. I think this feature of Viverse is pretty cool and useful for enterprise customers.

I’ve also been told that there are some AI features in the software and I’ve been shown one that is pretty cool, which is live translation. I could choose a language, and then whatever was said by the people in the room, no matter what language they were speaking, was translated into the language of my choice in the subtitles in front of me. It worked very well and I think it can be very useful for meetings of people that come from different countries, especially if some people are not very skilled with English.

I’ve also been able to notice some problems with this platform: from my first usage, it seemed to me that the UX of the UI of the application was not always very intuitive. Plus for the limitations of the Focus Vision chipset, in the beginning, I did not have an ideal framerate, so I had to tone down a bit visual quality of Viverse to correctly visualize the big lobby of the application.

Anyway, I had a positive first impression of Viverse: it seemed to me a solid platform for enterprise meetings and presentations, with also some interesting special features like the polygon streaming of complex 3D models.

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And that’s it with my hands-on of HTC Vive technologies! I hope this has been interesting for you to read, and if this is the case, please subscribe to my newsletter so as not to lose my next article!