HTC Unveils the Next Step in Virtual Reality with the Sleek VIVE Pro
HTC announced their next step into the world of virtual reality, with the Vive Pro. While we don’t know when to expect the HTC’s latest piece of tech, or how deep consumers will have to dig into their pockets. Fortunately, HTC provided us with a slew of details to help tide us over.
Leading the new additions to the Vive is the Pro’s new display, “Vive Pro includes dual-OLED displays for a crisp picture resolution of 2880 by 1600 combined, a 78 percent increase in resolution over the current Vive HMD.” In conjunction with a button allowing users to adjust the distance of the screen from their face to accommodate for glasses. This new iteration for the Vive is set to make leaps in terms of visual quality. In a conversation with Polygon, HTC Vive general manager hints at just how far he expects these new additions to go, “What this does, with the higher pixel density, is give you the ability to read in VR.” He goes on to add “We’ve had a lot of enterprise and professional use cases where they want to design a car or design a dashboard layout, and they need a higher resolution or pixel density in order to do that. So now that you can do that with this headset, we’re really excited about those scenarios and how game developers will take advantage of it, as well as the professional market.”
Outside of visual improvements, the Vive Pro is equipped with a few other features to lend to a better virtual reality experience. At first glance, the most obvious of these is an additional camera being located on the headset itself for the first time. According to Polygon, HTC is “being a bit cagey” on what this new addition will allow. However, Obrien ensures us that his work with developers thus far should have us excited for what’s to come, “We are opening the second camera up and giving developers a better camera experience than they had on the original Vive, and we’re working with a lot of developers on different experiences they can use with two cameras, like having depth-sensing with the second camera. A lot of the new features and functions are in-progress, and we’re excited about showing those things off very soon.”
At the moment the Vive Pro is not slated to be a complete replacement for the current Vive. HTC is planning to sell both models throughout 2018, giving consumers multiple entry points to the world of virtual reality.
Are you ready to take the plunge and say farewell to the physical world? Drop a comment or come join our Discord to let us know what you think about the future of virtual reality.
Source: Polygon
