The HTC presentation and messaging was unfortunately pretty abysmal. It was confusing, misleading and incredibly light on the actual information that technical people would want to know. However, the community has been piecing all the information we received together and a coherent picture is beginning to form.

Vive Cosmos

Although HTC did their best to misconstrue the Cosmos as a standalone/phone tethered headset in their, frankly, bizarre reveal video (below), it is actually a really interesting VR headset.

The Cosmos is actually a pretty close approximation to what I have expected the Rift-S to be. It is an inside out tracking, PC VR headset with a higher (and RGB!? nice) resolution screen. It also will run SteamVR and OpenVR, despite HTC’s best efforts to hide that (HTC would really like you to try out Viveport but, to a western audience especially, focusing on Viveport over SteamVR support is cutting off your nose to spite your face).

An HTC product finally gets some new controllers!

So could the Cosmos be the Rift-S of the SteamVR eco-system? With Quest/Touch style controllers, potentially the highest resolution screen we’ve seen yet in VR (unconfirmed) and an extreme focus on ease of use and comfort it certainly sounds like it. I feel like if they had simply presented the headset in that light during their reveal video it would have received a much different reaction. There is still a lot we don’t know, like whether it will have an onboard CPU/GPU (if not it could be quite affordable), just what devices it can connect to in the future (only PC is specified right now but that ghostly phone image raises ever more questions) and the price/launch window/specs but what we do know now is enough to make it more interesting than it seemed at first glance.

Vive Pro Eye

On the Vive Pro Eye side things were much more clear cut. They showed off a Vive Pro with eye-tracking that can enable foveated rendering. If one or two big apps pick this up (Elite, X-Plane, PCars 2) or better yet if there is some baseline application of the technique that affects all apps (a guy can dream right?) than that will immediately appear back on my interest list. Eye tracking and foveated rendering exist. They work. The only question is who will support it or will it just serve as the foveated rendering dev kit that paves the way for the 2.0 headsets in which it will likely be mandatory.

Wrap Up

So HTC will be bringing two new HMDs to the market in (I assume) 2019. Both with their own unique takes on where VR headsets are going in the near term. Although I would really appreciate clearer messaging and support of the SteamVR storefront and ecosystem as opposed to this relentless focus on Viveport (it is understandable why they need to focus on their own store front), HTC does appear to have started out 2019 with a bang.

… and if that was not enough, HTC stated there is a follow up to the original Vive somewhere in the development pipeline.