This year is set to be an important one for HTC Vive. The company will be expanding its ecosystem via a number of different avenues, directly to customers via headsets like Vive Cosmos and Vive Focus Plus, whilst also ensuring more third-party devices have access to Vive Wave and Viveport. When it comes to the latter, today, HTC Vive has announced a collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies to pre-integrate and optimize Vive Wave for Qualcomm’s XR Standalone and 5G Smartphone reference designs.
Thanks to Qualcomm and HTC Vive working together, OEMs that decide to use Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platforms can then integrate Vive Wave into their standalone VR devices. Additionally, HTC Vive can create a turnkey XR solution for Smartphone OEMs to access the Viveport app store, offering consumers a growing library of content through XR Viewers tethered via USB Type-C.
“Through this collaboration, we’re working together to build and expand the ecosystem for the global XR industry by making it quick and easy to build mobile-based VR headsets,” said Raymond Pao, VP Product & Strategy, HTC Vive. “Benefiting both device manufacturers and developers, this joint effort with Qualcomm Technologies serves to rapidly accelerate new VR headsets across the world and distribution points for developers through Viveport.”
This will also benefit Smartphone OEMs looking to take advantage of 5G networks, with HTC Vive and Qualcomm Technologies providing optimized solutions to grow the XR ecosystem using Vive Wave and Viveport.
“At Qualcomm Technologies, we are commited to transforming the XR industry and our collaboration with HTC Vive aims to help accelerate XR adoption for consumers,” said Hugo Swart, Head of XR for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are excited to work with HTC Vive to bring Viveport to Smartphone OEMs and global operators to unleash the low latency and high speed potential of 5G and deliver unparalleled XR experiences.”
Based on Android, Vive Wave was built specifically for standalone, mobile head-mounted displays (HMD). The platform has been used on six headsets from partners such as Pico, iQiYi, Shadow Creator, and DPVR. When more headsets arrive supporting the Vive Wave platform, VRFocus will let you know.
As the name implies, Qualcomm’s standalone headset isn’t designed to be a consumer offering from the company. Rather a design that OEM’s can utilise to create their own headsets, much in the same way Microsoft did with Windows Mixed Reality headsets.
With a dual camera system on the front, the inside-out tracking seemed to work reasonably well. It was a shame there wasn’t a massive amount of space to wander around in, yet stepping backwards and forwards was completed without any latency and thankfully no walls were bumped into. To test this and the controller an on-rails demo took place inside a space ship manned by robots. After a quick sweep around the hanger it was time to shoot some bugs. This proved to be somewhat haphazard as the controller was fairly compact, so the headset cameras tended to lose sight of the device. This is the reason Windows Mixed Reality headset controllers have such a big ring, helping keep the controllers in view.
