Though Mobile World Congress is usually a smartphone-focused affair, HTC hasn't let that stop them from announcing a new standalone version of their Vive VR headset aimed at enterprise customers.
“At Vive, the announcement of Vive Focus Plus furthers our commitment to rapidly iterate and refine the VR market for both businesses and consumers,” said Raymond Pao, General Manager of HTC Asia.
“This rollout of Vive Focus Plus leads the way for deeper immersion, more realistic training and simulation, and easier porting of experiences from PC to the stand-alone category.”
An upgrade on the original Vive Focus headset, the Vive Focus Plus incorporates dual 6DoF (6-degrees-of-focus) controllers and 3K AMOLED display.
HTC are also talking up the ease with which the new WAVE VR platform and SDK tools will make it possible for developers to port PC-based VR experiences to the Vive Focus Plus.
“In our dedication to occupational health and safety, we easily ported our entire Hazard Spotting range from the Vive Pro to Vive Focus Plus to facilitate our large corporation deployments,” said Olivier Pierre, COO and Founder, Immersive Factory.
“Vive Focus Plus will perfectly immerse our clients in realistic environments enabling full movement, which supports memorisation of process and procedures, and improves behavior by creating consequences to their actions. Having a professional standalone headset is very important for us to widely integrate and deploy virtual reality for workforce training at large groups, with plants all other the world, who previously saw the equipment as a barrier.”
The HTC Vive Focus Plus will be on display at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
HTC say that the Vive Focus Plus headset will be available for purchase starting in Q2 2019 on https://www.vive.com/au/ in 25 markets worldwide, supporting 19 languages. In most markets, the product will also include an enterprise license for use at no additional cost.
Disclosure - PC World Australia's coverage of this year's MWC in Barcelona was sponsored by Oppo who covered the costs of our flights and accommodation.