Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient Arms-On: Lossless PC VR By Fresnel Lenses

We not too long ago went fingers on with Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient, HTC’s latest headset that launches in the present day.

In the event you missed the announcement final month amidst all of the Meta and Pico information, Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient is a refresh of Vive Focus 3 with shade passthrough, eye monitoring, extra RAM, and assist for lossless PC VR through a DisplayPort adapter.

Whereas Vive Focus 3 was solely formally bought to companies, HTC is advertising Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient to shoppers too, principally as a PC VR headset through the $150 DisplayPort accent. HTC’s pitch right here is that for $1150 you get a headset with greater decision than Quest 3 and Pico 4 Extremely, with built-in eye monitoring and lossless high quality PC VR.

So does all this make Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient the brand new PC VR headset of selection? I attended HTC’s launch occasion to seek out out.

Consolation-wise, Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient feels precisely like its predecessor. It is hefty, weighing in at virtually 800 grams complete, however that weight could be very nicely distributed, with the battery behind the thick rear padding, not within the visor itself. It by no means felt uncomfortable in my time with it, although I did not put on it for greater than 45 minutes at a time.

I wasn’t in a position to attempt the passthrough of Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient at this occasion, however the lighting within the room was very dim, so I am unsure it could have been a significant take a look at. And within the context of PC VR, this does not a lot matter.

HTC had three demo stations arrange, one seated with Automobilista 2 and the opposite two standing with Arizona Sunshine 2. All three used the DisplayPort adapter for lossless PC VR.

On each Arizona Sunshine 2 demo stations, I instantly seen a wierd challenge the place each few seconds a show body would drop when rotating my head. Most VR customers in the present day have by no means seen an actual full show body drop, as trendy VR compositors reproject the earlier body rotationally to eradicate them. When Oculus’s Asynchronous Timewarp launched this system in 2015 it was an enormous deal. Even a single show body dropping in VR is clearly perceptible and jarring, and that was the case right here.

HTC advised me that this was a difficulty with a pre-release model of the cable, and claimed it will not be a difficulty within the transport model. The third demo station, operating the Automobilista 2 racing sport, didn’t have this challenge, so I spent most of my time enjoying it.

Like with Sony’s for PlayStation VR2, HTC’s adapter takes an included 5 meter USB-C cable from the headset on one aspect, and DisplayPort, USB-A, and mains energy on the opposite.

Powered by an RTX 4090 laptop computer, the mixture of the 2448×2448 panels and lossless video sign supplied picture high quality a noticeable step above the compressed Quest 3 setup I normally use for VR sim racing, with genuinely spectacular element – within the heart of the lens at the very least. Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient continues to make use of fresnel lenses, not pancake, complicating the visible high quality query. As with all fresnel lenses, I noticed a noticeable blur wherever past of the middle of the lens, and in apply this implies you will rotate your head extra and your eyeballs much less. In darkish scenes with vibrant objects, I additionally noticed important glare illuminating the fresnel rings.

Within the context of sim racing this wasn’t a dealbreaker by any means, although, and maybe even preferable over the decrease decision and compressed picture of a Quest 3 on PC VR. And do not be so fast to lump Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient in with the opposite new fresnel lens headset, Quest 3S. Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient’s eye monitoring and motorized lenses mix to routinely horizontally align the lenses virtually completely together with your eyes, that means the optical match is a lot better than being restricted to simply three steps.

In PC VR titles which assist dynamic foveated rendering through third-party instruments like OpenXR Toolkit, Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient’s eye monitoring also needs to allow you to enhance high quality additional than what you’d get on headsets with out it. Automobilista 2 is not a kind of titles, although, and your mileage will range when utilizing such instruments.

The most typical use case of Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient’s eye monitoring within the shopper area, apart from the automated IPD adjustment, will doubtless be driving avatar eyes in VRChat. With HTC’s $100 Vive Facial Tracker addon, VRChat fans ought to be capable to add face monitoring too, and with just a few hundred extra {dollars} of Vive Final Trackers they will simply add physique monitoring.

To date I’ve targeted on Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient as a PC VR headset, since that is how HTC is especially pitching it to shoppers. Sure, it additionally works absolutely standalone, however its retailer has solely a tiny fraction of what you’d discover on Quest and even on Pico, so I doubt greater than a handful of shoppers will care about this. Even in enterprise, Focus 3 was extra usually used as a wi-fi PC VR headset than really standalone, and I do not anticipate this pattern to vary with Focus Imaginative and prescient. That is doubtless why HTC selected so as to add new options as an alternative of improve the XR2 chipset.

So let’s return to the query that prompted this text: is Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient the brand new PC VR headset of selection?

In the event you’re a PC VRChat consumer who needs your eyes and expressions tracked however do not just like the compression artifacts of Quest Professional, perhaps. However when you do not care about eye monitoring, you possibly can get even greater decision with higher lenses at a decrease value from Pimax Crystal Gentle, or get the wealthy colours and distinction of OLED with PlayStation VR2’s PC adapter. And when you’re okay with compression, you may after all simply decide up a Quest 3 or Pico 4 Extremely and benefit from the pancake lenses expertise of wanting together with your eyes as an alternative of at all times rotating your head.

The issue for HTC is that whilst PC VR headset, Vive Focus Imaginative and prescient faces steep competitors, and it is unclear what number of shoppers care sufficient about its distinctive options to decide on it.