Last week VRFocus reported on the emergence of a wireless HTC Vive in development by the company Quark VR, makers of a platform where virtual reality (VR) applications can be used multiplatform. There were quite a few points that were ambiguous, but after getting in contact with the company a few questions have been answered.
The first question that was asked was whether or not Quark VR was in an official partnership with Valve or HTC, and if they were making it together. Krasi Nikolov, CEO of Quark VR, replied: “We don’t have an official partnership with Valve. They are advising us on the OpenVR integration, and supported us with hardware. They are very open and supportive to all Vive developers.”
Nikolov went on to explain whether or not this would result in a new model of HTC Vive, to which he replied that for now it will only be a prototype, as it is too early to talk about anything else.
The next thing that posed a rather big question was how this would work practically, whether or not the HTC Vive is modded. “They way it works is the Vive is connected to a Single Board Computer, and a battery. The SBC is running Quark VR, which is the VR streaming software we are developing. We’ve come up with a low latency streaming solution that meets the demands of VR.”
The prototype is something that Nikolov is particularly interested by, and hopes to irradicate limitations in VR: “The idea for the project came along as a way to show off the capabilities of Quark VR. So far we have a version for Gear VR and Google Cardboard, but as you know, those are limited to 60 fps and don’t have positional tracking. However, applying our software to the HTC Vive would circumvent these limitations, which makes us very excited!”
For anyone who is particularly intrigued by this idea, Quark VR will be taking the prototype to VRDC this November, as well as SVVR and SFVR.
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