In the last few weeks, I’ve often seen the community debating about what is the future of HTC Vive: once the market leader in VR, the company has lately been pretty silent about releasing new VR headsets. Instead of simply speculating, I directly contacted the company and spoke with a spokesperson about the present and the future of HTC’s XR business. Keep reading to discover where the truth is.
Why are people thinking that “Vive is dead”?
Many people are convinced that HTC has abandoned XR because of the following cues:
- The company released its latest VR headset (the Vive Focus Vision) more than one and a half years ago
- The latest headset released by the company was just a refresh of a previous device
- There’s not much communication from their side
- In January 2025, HTC sold a big part of its XR division to Google for $250M
Many are speculating that HTC will not release any new headset (see this Reddit thread as an example), and the company is destined to close. But is this the truth?
HTC is still very active in the XR business
The quick answer to the previous question is “no”, HTC is not dying, and it is actually still active in XR. The company even clearly stated to me that “We continue to see a bright future for XR and immersive technology”.
The long answer is a bit more complex, and I will detail it in the remainder of this article.
HTC Vive is not just about VR headsets
The first thing that the company spokesperson clarified with me is that “HTC has always had multiple business units and is always exploring different technologies”. The meaning is clear: do not just look at the number or released VR headsets to judge our business and our commitment to XR. And in fact, HTC Vive has taken part in many interesting XR projects in the last few months.
Vive Eagle
A few months ago, Vive announced its “Eagle” smartglasses. These are very colourful glasses that aim to connect people with AI. The Eagle glasses are more expensive than Meta’s ones, but they allow people and companies to choose the LLM they want to work with, including on-prem LLMs. While this is almost uninteresting for consumers, it is a great feature for enterprise companies: they could have a custom LLM running on their own servers, so that employees using glasses do not provide the company secrets to Meta AI or Gemini AI, but everything remains inside the perimeter of the company. As usual, HTC proves to be very attentive to the needs of the B2B sector.
Vive Eagle is currently available only in limited regions, but the company is “excited to be rolling out [them] across the world”. It is good to hear that these glasses are coming everywhere soon.
Speaking with me, the company highlighted that its endgame is AR glasses (like for Meta, Apple, etc…): “We see a future convergence of devices”, said the spokesperson. “There will be specialised HMDs, but the form factor that everyone is ultimately working towards for immersive technology is closer to a lightweight pair of glasses.” So the Vive Eagle is not just a random experiment, but it is a first step on the road towards lightweight AR glasses.
5G
HTC has always been a pioneer in experimentation with 5G and XR. “5G will be important […] and having fast WiFi which has high-capacity,” said the spokesperson. “If the heavy lifting of processing can be offloaded to the cloud, and the device mainly has to focus on rendering, then we can see some significantly smaller and lighter devices. Our G-REIGNs division has a wide range of applications and live deployments, including directly supporting XR across different industries.”
This confirms HTC’s interest in devices that become always smaller, like glasses or very lightweight headsets. 5G allows offloading the computational load on edge servers, so that lightweight XR glasses become a viable possibility.
LBE (Location Based Entertainment)
Vive has always been a clear leader in the location-based entertainment VR field. The company reiterated to me that in the latest months, it has “worked closely with a wide range of partners” in the field.
The Vive Arts team worked closely with other teams on wonderful experiences, like “La Magie Opéra” (which won the Best Visual Experience award at the XR Awards), or “Playing With Fire” at the Paris Philharmonie.
And while there have not been many devices released lately, the company is still providing software updates to improve the performance in the LBE VR sector. “We’ve worked on a series of updates for our different XR products and have more in the pipeline,” said the spokesperson, “adding features like an optimised ‘wheelchair mode’ to help our partners to make LBE even more accessible. We’re hoping that Excurio might be one of the first to use that; they’ve had another stellar year with great ticket sales around the world.”
Investments
Vive has always been very active in investing in relevant XR startups. In fact, I remember visiting the Vive X accelerator during my first trip to China. During the years, it invested in relevant companies like Neurable, VRChat, and ENGAGE.
And these investments are still ongoing: recently, Vive was the main investor in the $6M funding round received by the talented creative studio Atlas V (some rumors say it invested something like $3M itself). This is a sign the company is still alive and kicking: you don’t invest $3M if you are bankrupting…
Viverse
Vive is investing a lot in Viverse, its “metaverse platform”. I even personally know some creators who got some funding to develop worlds on it. The platform itself is also evolving. There was a big announcement last week: Viverse is now open to video hosting (like Vimeo or YouTube), and even apps. What’s more, the team has rolled out a really impressive new monetisation model for creators, tied directly to views of the content instead of ad-based views.
There are also works that are ported from LBE to Viverse: “Recently on VIVERSE, we showcased some of the exceptional ‘Versailles: Lost Gardens of the Sun King’ by Small Creative, which had previously been an LBE hosted at Versailles. And there are other projects coming which will work across both VIVERSE and our LBE partners, like the Little Prince.”
Viverse is, together with LBE, the sector where HTC Vive is the most active.
BUT… what about Vive VR headsets?
After all these words, I think you got the idea that HTC Vive is still in the XR business, operating on different sides of it. The company also said that its partners “see strong growth across a range of verticals”, so business is also going quite well in some sectors. But I guess you, like me, have still one big question in mind: is HTC Vive also going to launch new Virtual Reality headsets? Will we ever see a Focus 4 or HTC Vive Pro 3?
Well, the company did not answer this question. And it was to be expected: companies rarely share info about their future plans.
But if I had to speculate (and be careful: before, I just reported official statements, while from now on I’ll just tell you my own speculations), I wouldn’t hold my breath for a new Vive VR headset. I’ll tell you why: one thing that I learned as a blogger is that giving or not giving a PR answer is an answer by itself. If HTC wanted to reassure us all that a VR headset was coming for sure, I would have gotten an “HTC is committed to releasing new VR headsets, but can’t tell more about this” answer. This is similar to what Meta is doing now: since it wants to reassure people that it is not abandoning VR, Boz is publicly saying that they are working on two new VR headsets.
The fact that HTC Vive did not want to answer that means that either no new VR headsets are in the works, or the company is not sure if launching new VR headsets yet. Also, the emphasis in their answer on “the many business fields” and the new focus on small devices and glasses make me think that VR is no longer their main focus. Which is not surprising, considering that Meta also pivoted to glasses recently.
So, Vive is not dead, but purely VR headsets by HTC may be. The company is probably keeping selling the existing ones, servicing existing customers, and updating the software, but it’s unclear what will happen when the current offering becomes old. I guess we’ll see: maybe it will release some lightweight XR glasses…
And that’s it for today! Let me know what you think about HTC and its commitment to XR in the comments of this article and on my social media channels! And don’t forget to share this post to let your peers know about what Vive is doing in the field…
(Header image by HTC Vive)