HTC could be showing off its standalone VR headset at the company’s November 14th Vive Developer Conference (VDC) in Beijing. As reported by YiVian, the conference has recently published promotional material featuring a veiled image of the company’s upcoming headset. To wit, HTC says it will have ‘some important announcements’ to make.
First teased at Google I/O 2017 developer conference, both HTC and Lenovo announced they were building standalone VR headsets featuring inside-out positional tracking for the Daydream platform—or in HTC’s case, the Viveport platform in China.
YiVian, an English-language publication that covers China’s tech industry, has recently come across a promotional flier for VDC 2017 which positions the shrouded Vive standalone in an unhatched egg – to be revealed at the conference in Beijing at the Crowne Plaza Beijing Sun Palace on November 14th.
While it’s no means a final nail in the coffin, the official promotional flier says (in English) “a new revolutionary immersive experience is here. Stay focused on the next wave of innovations in VR.”
Digging into trademark registrations, YiVian also found that HTC has recently registered the name “Vive M” in China, possibly meaning ‘Vive Mobile’—a move that would position the new standalone as somewhat of a little brother to the tethered PC VR Vive headset. Both ‘Vive Focus’ and ‘Vive Eclipse’ have been registered in the West however, making it less clear what name the headset will take and where.
image courtesy HTC
The crucial difference between current mobile headsets like Gear VR or Daydream View is the inclusion of positional tracking thanks to the headsets’ inside-out tracking capabilities. Built with help from Google, both HTC and Lenovo’s headsets are based off Qualcomm’s ‘VRDK’ reference device and built on the Snapdragon 835.
HTC and Lenovo standalone headsets are shown alongside what appears to be a standard Bluetooth 3DoF Daydream controller as well. Both companies are staying mum on any other specifics, although Google said to expect them some time in 2017.
We won’t be attending VDC, but if on the off-chance you’re in the Beijing area, you can sign up for VDC here. We’ll be following along, so check back soon.
Today at Oculus Connect 4, the company’s annual developer conference, Oculus revealed the Project Santa Cruz ‘Prototype 2’ standalone VR headset, including 6DOF motion controllers. Though it might not look obviously different at a distance than the original prototype showed off last year, up close it’s clear that it’s actually a big step forward, including new lenses and a new display.
Following the Project Santa Cruz announcements during the keynote, including that dev kits will be in developers hands within the next year, I got whisked away to a behind-closed-doors demo of the latest version of the headset. Though the company announced another standalone headset today, Oculus Go, Project Santa Cruz is a different device entirely; it represents the company’s work on a high-end standalone offering (whereas Oculus Go aims for the low-end, more like Gear VR). And while Oculus Go has already been productized and is set to launch next year for $200, Project Santa Cruz is still in the prototype phase.
Quickly, to clear up any confusion, let’s be clear that Santa Cruz is a standalone headset. That means it doesn’t rely on a PC for anything—it has everything on board that it needs for VR, including power and compute. That’s different than a wireless headset, which would be untethered, but still rely on a host PC to do the rendering and computing. Because Santa Cruz is a standalone headset, the idea is that you can use it anywhere, and the inside-out tracking ought to give you essentially unlimited tracking volumes.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, back to the demo. I wasn’t able to take any videos or pictures, but I got a fairly close look at the device and I can tell you what I saw and experienced.
One more quick note: the headset I tried today had stamped on the front, ‘Santa Cruz Prototype II’, and so I’m going to call it the Santa Cruz P2, whereas I’ll call last year’s prototype the P1.
Hardware Changes From P1 to P2
Image courtesy Oculus
Form Factor
So, while the Santa Cruz P1 was essentially a Rift that was hacked together with a mobile compute/battery module attached to the back, and a new faceplate featuring the inside-out tracking tech on the front, the Santa Cruz P2 has a completely reworked form-factor which builds the compute/battery components directly into the display enclosure. So there’s no big bulge on the back like there was with the P1.
Display & Lenses
In addition to condensing everything into the display enclosure, the headset appears to be using a new, higher resolution display and new Fresnel lenses. Like the Rift, the P2 retains a hardware IPD adjustment slider, but unlike the Rift, it also has volume buttons on the bottom.
Hidden Integrated Audio
The P2 has integrated speakers but they aren’t over-ear like the Rift, instead they are hidden in/near the headstrap; you can’t really see them, but you can hear them (and so can anyone standing nearby). I did notice 3.5mm audio jacks on the left and right of the headset, suggesting you’d be able to plug your own headphones in for a better and more private listening experience. Folks from the Santa Cruz team told me that the audio solution for the P2 isn’t finalized yet, so we could see this change.
Head-mount and Ergonomics
The head-mount on the P2 is also all new. While the P1 was using the same head-mount as the Rift (rigid straps with the triangle in the back), the new straps are rigid at the front but become soft and rubbery as they progress around the back of your head. While the Santa Cruz P2 appeared a little bulkier and felt a bit heavier than the Rift, I’m actually quite surprised at its size and weight considering everything that they’ve had to pack inside the display enclosure.
Controllers
As for the new P2 controllers, Oculus says that the same team that made Touch build the Santa Cruz P2 controllers, and it shows—they feel and work just like you’d expect with Touch, except now there’s a trackpad on the top portion instead of a joystick and buttons.
Experience
Display & Lenses
Upon donning the Santa Cruz P2 I was immediately impressed with the new display and lenses. Although there was plenty of aliasing present (after all, this is a VR experience running on mobile compute hardware), the resolution was a big step up from the Rift. The pixel fill factor also seemed quite good, doing a lot to reduce the screen door effect. Mura correction also seemed very good, further enhancing perceived clarity, though for mura I need to get a look at a wider variety of scenes than I had time to see this time around.
Given how dark the black colors were on the display, I’d be willing to bet we’re looking at an OLED panel, which suggests the Santa Cruz P2 could be using a 2,560 × 1,440 display from Samsung (similar to those in their Gear VR smartphones). It can be tough to gauge, but I feel like I could see a faint bit of flicker from the display (some people are more sensitive to flicker than others), which makes me think the refresh rate of the P2 is not as high as the 90Hz that we’re used to on the Rift. More likely (especially given the increased resolution and limited compute resources) the P2’s display is running at 75Hz or possibly lower.
Tracking
Oculus told me that tracking on the P2 had been a major focus since the P1 was shown last year. Using wide angle cameras mounted on the corners of the display enclosure, the headset integrates four independent views for inside-out tracking, and now the same cameras doing the inside-out tracking also track the P2 controllers, similar to the Windows VR headsets.
The cameras enabling inside-out tracking on Santa Cruz are placed a the corners of the front plate | Image courtesy Oculus
The company says they’ve worked to further increase the field of view of the cameras to create the largest tracking area they could in order to reduce the chance that the controllers would exit the tracking volume.
Oculus says the green sphere represents the tracking volume for the Santa Cruz P2 controllers | Image courtesy Oculus
The tracking was quite good, and allowed me to walk confidently around a huge area of roughly 20 × 10 feet (the only thing that was stopping me from going further was the physical walls of the room). I’m so used to being inside of tethered headsets that it felt incredibly freeing to keep walking after several steps, when I would otherwise be approaching the edge of the playspace in most other systems.
Oddly, I did notice a very small but consistent jitter when standing still and looking at nearby static objects. I say “oddly” because I don’t recall seeing the same jitter on the P1 headset last year. I mentioned this to some of the nearby Oculus folks involved with developing Santa Cruz, and they were surprised to hear that I could see any jitter; they encouraged me to return for another demo to take a another look (which I will, and come back to update this article if I see anything different).
Generally speaking, major players in the VR space (including Oculus) say that you need sub-millimeter tracking precision in order to avoid any visible jitter. If that’s true, then I’d have to guess that the Santa Cruz P2 prototype isn’t quite that precise. It’s close though, and arguably ‘good enough’ as it’s quite a bit more precise than PSVR (which has had no trouble moving units even with its greater than sub-millimeter tracking precision).
Despite the jitter, I didn’t see a single instance of ‘jumping’ (where the tracking system is briefly confused) in the head tracking which is a good sign. Granted, like last year, the demo room I was in (decorated like the inside of an apartment) didn’t have anything shiny on the walls, like mirrors or windows, which can be particularly challenging for optical tracking systems. So we’ll still have to wait and see how performance holds up in truly real-world conditions.
Controllers
Image courtesy Oculus
Last year at Connect, the Santa Cruz P1 just showed off inside-out headset tracking. This year with the P2 they have thrown 6DOF controllers into the mix. These look a lot like Touch, except with the tracking ring flipped upside down. That’s of course to make the hidden IR LED markers more visible to the on-headset cameras, whereas Touch wants to make them visible to off-headset cameras opposite the user.
The controllers have a comfortable grip that feels very similar to Touch, including the trigger and hand-trigger. The major change other than the placement of the tracking ring is a trackpad on the top of the controller rather than buttons and a joystick (for now the trackpad is not used). And the controllers seem lighter.
Overall, the tracking felt very responsive, and, at least in the demos I played, it felt almost identical to using Touch. However, I did notice that my hand seemed to jump a bit when moving from one camera’s view to the next, similar to how a moving object doesn’t always pass seamlessly through a stitching line in a 360 video.
For the kind of demo I played (Dead and Buried)—mostly casual shooting gameplay—it may not matter that much if the player’s hands tweak their position somewhat as they pass from one camera view to the next. I could however see this being a bother for some situations, like art and design applications, where, for instance, you wouldn’t want your brush stroke to get a kink in it as your hand moves between camera views. So we’ll have to hope this can be smoothed out if Santa Cruz is going to work well for all VR applications.
Audio
The decision to use integrated speakers in the P2, rather than headphones, was probably made with the aim of creating a headset with low weight, high portability/durability, and quick setup. If the P2 used the same on-ear headphones as the Rift, you might be worried about them breaking off if you throw the headset in your backpack. By removing them, they’ve potentially created a more robust product, not to mention reduced the weight, and a quicker fit when you put on the device.
To me the speakers sounded high in treble and without much bass; definitely a worse soundstage than I’m used to with the Rift. It also seemed much harder for me to understand where the spatial audio was coming from within the virtual world. Though, again, I can appreciate the thought behind this approach.
Thankfully, the 3.5mm headphone jacks (yes, plural) should mean that players can their own headphones if they like. There’s a 3.5mm jack on each side of the headset, and presumably they’re both mono jacks which would, together, offer left and right channels. I would hope that each jack could potentially also handle stereo audio output so that users could use their own headphones rather than be stuck with proprietary headphones with separated left and right audio plugs.
Ergonomics
As I mentioned, I was actually pretty impressed with the size of the P2 headset given everything that they’ve crammed into it. That said, it still feels a little bigger and heavier than the Rift, so I hope they can cut that down yet further before launch.
The new stretchy rubber head strap actually seemed quite comfortable to use. Not only was it easy to put on, but the rubber can better conform to the back of your head, whereas the shape of the Rift’s rear rigid head strap (the triangle area) is really only ideally suited for someone with one particular head shape (since it can’t flex).
And whether it is objectively better or not, it feels easier to pull the P2’s rubber strap into the optimal position, whereas with the Rift’s rigid strap I see people mis-fitting it constantly; so if Santa Cruz sticks with the rubber strap route, it could be a net positive to comfort simply by making it easier for more people to figure out the optimal fit. Of course, it really takes more time with a headset to assess true long term comfort.
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Feel free to drop a note in the comments below if you’ve got additional questions about my time with the Santa Cruz P2 headset.
HTC has submitted a new trademark application in both Europe and the US, specifically requesting the use of a new name: Vive Focus.
First revealed at Google I/O 2017 developer conference, both HTC and Lenovo announced they were building standalone VR headsets for the Daydream platform. Neither headset revealed its perspective name, only showing concept art and a black silhouette for HTC’s new headset.
Today, the Dutch publication LetsGoDigital (via VRFocus) brought the trademark applications to light, which were initially filed on September 8th. While HTC still hasn’t said anything on the matter, leaving some doubt about whether the naming scheme is indeed intended for the standalone headset, Google had said the devices will launch later in 2017. With the holiday season fast approaching, we’ll have a definitive answer either way soon enough.
image courtesy LetsGoDigital
The standalone Daydream VR headsets are said to include inside-out positional tracking—a decisive upgrade over the rotational-only tracking of the smartphone-powered Daydream View headset. Using a computer vision-based sensor system, that the company is calling ‘World-sense’, the tracking tech won’t require any external beacons or sensors to enable a room-scale mobile VR experience.
Both HTC and Lenovo standalone headsets are basing their work on Qualcomm’s ‘VRDK’ reference device, unveiled at Google I/O in May. We got a hands-on with an early prototype of Qualcomm’s VRDK standalone headset, and despite the fact that it was essentially one year-old tech at the time, Road to VR executive editor Ben Lang said that when left to roam a 10 diameter circular carpet, that the tracking was pretty robust. More importantly, the reference design clearly showed the signs of integrated eye-tracking, which puts the Focus naming scheme in a different light. If the supposition is true, it would mean Focus was named specifically to sell the benefit of eye-tracking to consumers.
HTC today announced a new variant of its Vive standalone VR headset which is aimed specifically at the Chinese VR market and will tap the company’s Viveport content platform as the official app store for the headset. Meanwhile, in the US & EU markets, the standalone Vive headset is backed by Google’s Daydream ecosystem.
Battle of the App Stores
Google and HTC announced the Vive standalone VR headset earlier this year. There, as with Valve in their tethered headset business, HTC teamed up with Google to make the headset part of the Daydream family, backed by Daydream apps in the Play Store.
In China however, HTC wants to head the headset’s content store itself. Thus, a very similar Vive standalone headset is planned to launch in China, with the company’s Viveport VR app store designated as the “official content platform,” of the device.
In the US & EU markets, Viveport for the tethered Vive headset has fallen into a supporting role as a sort of ‘alternate’ app store, with Valve’s Steam platform handling the vast majority of content distribution for the headset. In China, HTC’s Viveport plays nearer to center stage, and the company clearly wants to continue growing that role, on both desktop and mobile.
Standalone Tech
Standalone headsets are fully self-contained, rather than reliant on a smartphone to power the VR experience. That means they can be more powerful and potentially longer lasting, since they don’t need to conform to the specifications of a smartphone thin smartphone with a tiny battery.
Both the US and Chinese versions of the Vive standalone headset are based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835-powered VRDK reference headset and are likely to feature very similar, if not identical, external designs. While HTC hasn’t revealed any specs for the headset, you can get an idea of what to expect from our recent analysis of the Qualcomm VRDK. We also went hands-on with a prototype version of the headset earlier this year.
Lingering Questions
One big question (which we’re trying to get answered) is what tracking technology the Chinese Vive standalone headset will rely on. We know that the US & EU variant will benefit from Google’s WorldSense tracking tech by virtue of being backed by the Daydream ecosystem. Great inside-out positional tracking for standalone VR headsets is still not easy technology to come by, so the choice of tracking tech could have important implications for the end user experience.
Another question on our mind is whether or not owners of the Chinese Vive standalone headset will be allowed to opt into accessing the Daydream VR ecosystem instead (and vive vice versa for the US & EU version); after all, the headset is very likely to be based on Android.
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In its announcement, HTC says it is “building up a rich library of VR experiences for the standalone VR market.” So far it’s unclear to what extent standalone VR content will differ from today’s mobile VR content made for smartphone-based headsets.
“China is the leading mobile market in the world today, and has the momentum to lead the global VR market as well,” said Alvin W. Graylin, China Regional President of Vive at HTC. “Partnering with Qualcomm to deliver an easy to use and more affordable Vive VR system will enable us to make premium standalone VR widely accessible to the masses in China.”
There’s no word on when the Chinese Vive standalone headset will come to market, or how much it will cost, though with the US & EU version confirmed for 2017, we expect the Chinese version to hit a similar window. As for pricing, Google gave us a (not so enticing) ballpark earlier this year.
Daydream’s 2.0 software update, called Daydream Euphrates, is going to bring along with it some major changes that are set to reach down to the core of the upcoming Android ‘O’ operating system. In a AR/VR press briefing, Google told us there are a number of new systems the update will add across all Daydream headsets, regardless of whether they’re standalone or smartphone-based.
The Android operating system was primarily designed to work on devices with a touchscreen, but with the addition of standalone headsets, this is about to change in a big way. To make the upcoming Android ‘O’ OS more VR-friendly, Google is integrating some things you might think are pretty basic, but in the end are intended to give VR users the tools they need to manage the ‘always in VR’ nature of standalone headsets.
Daydream Home
2.0 will add a dashboard on top of any VR experience so you can check notifications, change settings, pause experiences, and most importantly switch from app-to-app like on a smartphone. This includes support for 2D system UI.
As for the store itself, Google says they want to put content front and center of the Daydream Home experience with an update to the Daydream UI.
image courtesy Google
While the company contends that 360 video is the most popular type of content people are consuming in VR right now, they’re adding more ways to categorize so that users can easily browse the store for all types of content, bringing Daydream Home more in line with digital marketplaces like Oculus Home and Valve’s SteamVR UI.
Daydream Cast
Google Cast-support is also coming to Daydream devices so people outside of VR can see what you’re doing.
image courtesy Google
This also means app developers can create cooperative games that involve people outside the headset like VR party game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (2015).
Daydream Sharing
Daydream Sharing adds the ability to capture screenshots and screencaptures, and then share them via social media.
“This worked really well in Tiltbrush,” a Google spokesperson remarked. “It’s actually one of the number one ways people discover and learn about Tiltbrush – is their friends who are in it post something about it.”
Developer Updates
Developers creating apps for the Daydream platform should take note; there’s also a number of graphics, audio and general performance updates as well.
During Day 2 of Google I/O 2017, following major announcements of support for standalone VR headsets and a ‘2.0’ release of the Daydream software platform, Mike Jazayeri, Director of Product Management for Daydream, stated that “tens of millions” of Daydream-Ready devices are expected in the market by the end of the year.
After Daydream VR’s positive start in November 2016, it has taken a while for additional third-party Daydream-Ready devices to appear, perhaps due to the demanding minimum hardware requirements. Today, there are eight Daydream-Ready devices on the market, and momentum will continue to build throughout the year as flagship products from Samsung and LG begin to support the platform. The announcement of Samsung’s flagship S8 and S8+ receiving Daydream support is particularly notable, as they represent the best devices for use on the competing Gear VR platform. LG’s flagship smartphone due in the second half of 2017 is also confirmed to be Daydream-Ready.
image courtesy Google
In addition, “existing partners such as Motorola and ASUS will launch more Daydream-Ready phones by the end of the year” says Jazayeri. This means Google rightfully expects multiple millions of Daydream-Ready devices in the market by the end of year—which may also include the estimated sales figures for the newly-announced standalone headsets from HTC and Lenovo.
Thanks to its massive head-start, Samsung’s Oculus-powered Gear VR platform has dominated the high-quality mobile VR market since its launch in November 2015, but the announcements at this year’s I/O developer event represent a major momentum swing in Google’s direction.
Continuing to push its established mobile VR business—recently revealing its flagship Galaxy S8 smartphones support and an updated Gear VR with controller—Samsung has again confirmed it has more powerful VR hardware up its sleeve. High-end, standalone VR headsets from Samsung are still in development, according to a report by CNET.
During an interview in South Korea just before the Galaxy S8 launch, Lee Young-hee, executive vice president of global marketing for Samsung mobile, confirmed that a high-end, standalone headset is “still under construction”. It is unclear whether the device can be tethered to a PC, but it is targeting “media producers and pro gamers”, so it certainly sounds like a device with aspirations to compete against the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift.
the New 2017 Gear VR with Controller
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a high-end VR headset from Samsung. Having collaborated with Oculus from an early stage in the Rift’s development, the technology giant has hinted at ambitious plans for VR over recent years, and recently showcased new VR/AR experiments at MWC. According to a report by PCWorld, prototype headsets were shown behind closed doors at the Barcelona event, showcasing the performance of their new 10nm Exynos 9 chips. Can a mobile chip deliver VR experiences comparable to those rendered on a high-end PC?
“We have two tracks” for VR, said Lee Young-hee in the build-up to the Galaxy S8 launch. “First of all, let’s democratize this new demand … [and] make it part of our smartphone experience.”
Intel says ‘Project Alloy’ is an open reference platform for companies who want to build advanced, all-in-one VR headsets. But the headset itself still in ong going development. Developers working closely with the headset have shared new details on what’s coming in the next version.
Calling Project Alloy just a VR headset is a bit of a misnomer. Not only is it a sensor-laden device capable of understanding the environment around it, it’s actually a full blown x86 head-worn computer running a PC-class Intel processor. You can literally plug it into a monitor and you’ll see a Windows 10 desktop.
Intel says that Project Alloy is an open reference platform; they want to let companies interested in building similar products use it as a starting point for their own headsets (and of course Intel then wants to sell those companies the chips to power those products). But Project Alloy itself is still in ongoing development, and isn’t expected to reach a level of finality until later this year.
While some aspects of the headset have impressed us (like the field of view, inside-out tracking, and is all-in-one nature), there’s still much room for improvement. A new version of the headset is on the way, and developers working closely with the device have filled us in on some of the forthcoming improvements.
Computer Vision Upgrades
Photo courtesy Intel
Perhaps most importantly, one of the major changes coming to Project Alloy is significantly enhanced computer-vision capabilities. Today’s Alloy prototype uses Intel’s RealSense camera technology for real-time depth mapping, but the high latency, low field of view, and sparse density of that depth data leaves a lot to be desired.
The next Alloy prototype will include a next-generation RealSense camera which will be paired with the dedicated Movidious computer vision processing chip, tech which intel acquired along with the company last year. The combination of these two things should mean much better and much faster depth mapping, which Intel is going to need to pull off its vision of ‘merged reality’, which aims to bring parts of the real world into the virtual environment.
Improved Field of View
Another incoming change that surprised us is a supposed increase in the headset’s field of view. Intel hasn’t detailed many of the basic specs of the current Project Alloy prototype, including resolution and field of view, but in our hands-on time we were quite pleased with the FoV, which felt comparable to the Vive and Rift. Like those two headsets, the present Alloy prototype is already using Fresnel lenses, and it’s not quite clear exactly what will be done to improve the field of view further, but we certainly welcome any enhancement on that front.
More Power Efficient CPU With Enhanced Integrated Graphics
The next Project Alloy headset will also come equipped with Intel’s latest 7th-gen ‘Kaby Lake’ processors. The company says the new chips are faster and more power efficient than their predecessors, which will be important for the standalone headset’s battery-powered runtime. The chip also has improved on-board graphics performance which is also hugely important as the headset doesn’t have the benefit of hooking up to a powerful desktop GPU.
Project Alloy is already a good start for Intel and the improvements coming in the next prototype promise to make it ever better. Another area we’re hoping to see the company make progress is on the bulk of the headset. Yes, for a completely self-contained device that’s crammed full of 10 individual sensors, it’s pretty compact. But it still needs to get smaller and lighter to become a headset that’s practical for regular long-term use.
Presently, it isn’t clear how much Intel might be able to shrink the device. Physical limitations of lens-focusing capabilities mean headset’s like Project Alloy will always need a certain amount of bulk simply to get the lenses and display positioned correctly, but smarter integration of the onboard electronics and sensors into the head-mount is probably a good next step until advanced display technology can solve the focal-distance issue.
