Perched above the hustle and bustle of the Las Vegas strip in a 21st floor hotel suite, 57-year-old Cher Wang, chief executive of smartphone company HTC, receives visitors with a smile. Despite a barrage of acerbic editorials in the last year, questioning whether her business will survive 2016, the Taiwanese boss is upbeat and excited. The reason? HTC’s new virtual reality headset, the Vive.

“Virtual reality is something people have talked about for 20, 30 years, in movies, in books and finally it is real,” she says. “VR has been on our minds for a long time, and now HTC has made virtual reality real.”