Category: Stephanie Llamas

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SuperData Research Weighs-In on CES 2018’s Biggest VR News

This year’s annual CES event, Las Vegas, has brought two major announcements for the virtual reality (VR) industry: HTC’s Vive Pro and Oculus VR’s partnership with Xiaomi for the launch of the Oculus Go in China, set to be known as Mi VR. Both of these announcements will shape the future of VR over the course of 2018, and SuperData Research’s head of immersive technology insights, Stephanie Llamas, offers her insights as to just how this will unfold.

Vive Pro ProfileBelow follows the commentary offered by Llamas, verbatim. Llamas is currently at CES 2018, along with VRFocus, and you can find out more about her experiences from the show on her personal blog.

Vive unveils hardware upgrades with the new Vive Pro

What this means: Tethering has been a big issue for VR thus far, which is why the Vive Focus and Oculus Go were designed to hopefully quell that issue. However, Vive is striving to create gold-standard devices (think of it as the iPhone of VR: higher cost, higher quality, lower accessibility), so experience is going to continue to trump affordability. But cost may be the key to adoption, at least in the beginning, so they will need to corner the enterprise market and provide extra compelling content for high-end users until mainstream consumers gradually get hungrier for premium devices.

Oculus VR partners with Xiaomi and Qualcomm to launch the Oculus Go worldwide and the Mi VR Standalone in China

What this means: Facebook can invest in VR without an immediate path to profit, unlike Vive. Therefore, they can afford to create more economical products that will help boost overall penetration and, in turn, make them the primary household name for VR. Oculus is also focusing on Facebook’s strong suits – social media and experiences – rather than invest in hardware development where they don’t need to. Right now, Vive is winning China in regard to high-end devices, so this is Oculus VR’s chance to get into the region by selling to a different market. Meanwhile, Xiaomi, which shipped over a million devices by November 2017, is striving to corner the Chinese standalone and premium mobile markets in the face of their strongest competitor, Huawei, who is working with Oculus VR competitor Google. These partnerships bode well for all companies involved – as long as the quality of experiences are high enough not to deter the general public from VR (the way Google Cardboard did).

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Is HTC Vive Falling Behind in the Standalone Headset Race? One Analyst believes So…

Last week HTC held the Vive Developers Conference, Beijing, in which the company finally revealed the Vive Focus; a standalone head-mounted display (HMD) set to launch in the Chinese market in 2018. However, the company has been very standoffish about confirming a western release, despite revealing that a previously announced partnership with Google had been cancelled. So where does this leave HTC’s plans?

HTC Vive Focus headset

According to Stephanie Llamas, VP of Research and Strategy of SuperData, the lack of any hard confirmation of a western release is almost as bad as outright denying a version of the HMD will be made available.

“It’s a shame this will only be available in China for the foreseeable future. This is part of a larger strategy to capture the Chinese market as quickly as possible, but Vive is going to be left behind in Western markets if HTC lets the Oculus GO come to market first, even if their headset is 6DoF instead of the GO’s 3DoF,” stated Llamas. “Standalones are the future of VR, and Vive can be a frontrunner — they just need to get it in front of consumers at a reasonable price.”

The actual story of HTC Vive’s intentions for the western market is somewhat complicated. Shortly after the announcement of the device a third-party confirmed to VRFocus that the Vive Focus would launch in North America and Europe later in 2018. However, HTC Vive then issued a statement to VRFocus which neither confirmed nor denied this fact.

Llamas does acknowledge that the Chinese market is important and that HTC Vive can benefit from targeting that audience first, however is cautious about the aggressive nature of the competition in China.

“The strategy to jump into the Chinese market as quickly as possible has benefited Vive, which is competing against the likes of Chinese tech goliaths Huawei, which is partnering up with TPCast to create wireless headsets that use cloudVR, and Xiaomi, which is also coming out with standalone.”

HTC Vive Focus animated GIF

HTC Vive has promised to deliver more details on plans for a western standalone HMD in 2018 and the likelihood is that the original plan – two similar HMDs with software distribution channels tied to their geographical demographic – is still in place. However, that delay into 2018 could cost HTC Vive as in addition to the Oculus Go, the high-end Santa Cruz HMD from Oculus VR is set to launch late next year. VRFocus will of course keep you updated with all the latest details on the Vive Focus, Oculus Go and Santa Cruz HMDs