HTC has hit back against claims of declining VR sales figures:
The blog post in particular references a report from Digital Trends which talks about VR sales figures from Amazon, and proceeds to point out a number of ways which the data presented could be misleading.
Several points made by HTC Vive are ones that have also been addressed by VRFocus, as seen in an article about the modern VR cycle, and some comments in the weekly VR vs. article. HTC Vive were not pulling punches right from the very start, evening saying in the introduction: "Analyst reports are in and apparently, it's curtains for Virtual Reality (VR). Pardon us if we're not heeding the alarms. News of the so-called death of VR comes once a year and is greatly exaggerated."
From there, the blog post proceeds in a point-by-point fashion, discussing how early consumer VR was largely driven by smartphone-based devices such as the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. Not only have these devices been superseded by standalone units like the Oculus Go, which offer a better visual experience, but the promotional offers which were available for phone launches have now long since passed. HTC Vive also point out that PC-based VR companies are yet to release any solid sales figures, and that much of the growth of premium VR has been centered around location-based VR centres, something which the Digital Trends report did not address.
Related: HTC's Vive Pro to Launch on April 5
Facebook Launches Oculus Go, a $200 Standalone VR Headset
VirtualLink Consortium Announces USB Type-C Specification for VR Headsets
Related Stories
HTC's Vive Pro virtual reality headset is now open for preorders. Resolution has been increased to 2800×1600 from 2160×1200, a microphone for noise cancellation analysis has been added, and it has two front-facing cameras instead of one, possibly allowing it to detect objects and hand movements:
The Vive Pro was announced early this year at CES, marking the first major upgrade to the Vive since its launch in 2016. It substantially increases the Vive's screen resolution, using two OLED displays that offer 1400 x 1600 pixels per eye compared to 1080 x 1200 on the current Vive. It also includes a variety of ergonomic changes, including built-in headphones and a head strap that tightens via dial instead of velcro. You could get these options via a kit for the original Vive, but now they're built into the core device, and we've found the hardware to be a distinct improvement over its predecessor.
The Vive Pro will not come with accessories at its launch price of $799, although existing Vive accessories can be used:
HTC's higher-resolution Vive Pro, first announced back in January, is setting new records for the price of a mass-market virtual reality headset. In pre-orders starting today ahead of planned April 5 shipments, customers will have to shell out $799 for the improved Vive Pro headset, a price that does not include any controllers or Lighthouse tracking base stations.
[...] HTC currently sells Vive controllers for $130 each and tracking base stations for $135 each. That means new Vive Pro customers will have to pay $1,330 for a higher-fidelity version of the same basic hardware included in the package for the original Vive (which is being reduced to $499 today, from the $599 price it has held since last April).
Facebook/Oculus has launched the standalone Oculus Go, which is an untethered wireless virtual reality headset similar to smartphone-based VR systems such as Samsung's Gear VR, but with its own built-in Snapdragon 821 SoC instead of using a smartphone:
The Oculus Go, a self-contained headset that offers mobile virtual reality without a smartphone, is going on sale today in 23 countries. The headset's $199 base version has 32GB of storage, and a 64GB version will sell for $249. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it "the easiest way to get into VR," and in our review, we've found that it's certainly easy to use — but it still has major limitations.
The Oculus Go lacks 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF), unlike the upcoming Lenovo Mirage Solo. It also has just about 1-2 hours of useful battery life before needing to be recharged for a couple of hours, and the company discourages you from wearing it while it is recharging. SuperData predicts that Oculus Go will outsell all other VR headsets this year. The low price of $200 and untethered design could bring VR closer to becoming mainstream.
At its F8 conference, Facebook hinted at some features coming to its future VR headsets, including variable depth-of-field using physically adjusted varifocal lenses, an increase from a 110 to a 140-degree field-of-view without increasing the size of the headset, and built-in hand tracking. (Also at TechCrunch.) Facebook also announced Oculus Venues, an app for displaying live sports events, concerts, comedy shows, etc. in VR. These live events will begin on May 30.
Also at Tom's Hardware, RoadtoVR, USA Today, and Digital Trends. MIT Technology Review has an interview with Rachel Franklin, Facebook's head of social VR, who admits "there's not much to do" in Facebook Spaces, the company's "social VR app".
VR rivals come together to develop a single-cable spec for VR headsets
Future generations of virtual reality headsets for PCs could use a single USB Type-C cable for both power and data. That's thanks to a new standardized spec from the VirtualLink Consortium, a group made up of GPU vendors AMD and Nvidia and virtual reality rivals Valve, Microsoft, and Facebook-owned Oculus.
The spec uses the USB Type-C connector's "Alternate Mode" capability to implement different data protocols—such as Thunderbolt 3 data or DisplayPort and HDMI video—over the increasingly common cables, combined with Type-C's support for power delivery. The new headset spec combines four lanes of HBR3 ("high bitrate 3") DisplayPort video (for a total of 32.4 gigabits per second of video data), along with a USB 3.1 generation 2 (10 gigabit per second) data channel for sensors and on-headset cameras, along with 27W of electrical power.
That much video data is sufficient for two 3840×2160 streams at 60 frames per second, or even higher frame rates if Display Stream Compression is also used. Drop the resolution to 2560×1440, and two uncompressed 120 frame per second streams would be possible.
Framerate is too low, and it's not wireless. Lame.
VirtualLink website. Also at The Verge.
Oculus Quest, a fully wireless VR headset, shipping spring 2019 for $399
Facebook used its latest virtual reality conference, the fifth annual Oculus Connect, to finally confirm retail plans for its most ambitious standalone VR product yet: the Oculus Quest. Originally known by its prototype name, Oculus Santa Cruz, the Quest will ship in spring 2019 for $399.
In terms of the sales pitch, this is the Oculus holy grail: a wireless, hand-tracked, "six degrees of freedom" VR system with apparently legitimate 3D power and no required PC or phone.
The headset will include two bundled handheld controllers, and more than 50 games will be available at launch. The headset has a 1600×1440 per eye resolution (3200×1440 total resolution), compared to 1280×1440 per eye for Oculus Go or 1440×1600 per eye for HTC's Vive Pro, and has 64 GB of internal storage.
Vive's wireless adapter gives the best VR experience lots of money can buy:
Facebook will never break through with Oculus, says one of the VR company's co-founders
Five years after its $2 billion purchase of Oculus, Facebook is still pushing forward in its efforts to bring virtual reality to a mainstream audience. But one of the company's six co-founders now doubts Oculus will ever break through.
Jack McCauley told CNBC he doesn't think there's a real market for VR gaming. With Facebook positioning its Oculus devices primarily as gaming machines, McCauley doesn't believe there's much of a market for the device. "If we were gonna sell, we would've sold," McCauley said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
[...] The $199 Oculus Go has sold a little more than 2 million units since its release in May 2018, according to estimates provided by market research firm SuperData, a Nielsen company. The Oculus Quest, which was released this May, has sold nearly 1.1 million units while the Oculus Rift has sold 547,000 units since the start of 2018, according to SuperData.
[...] Since leaving in November 2015, McCauley has enjoyed a semi-retired life. He's an innovator in residence at Berkeley's Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation and he continues to build all sorts of devices, such as a gun capable of shooting down drones, at his own research and development facility.
The cheaper, standalone headsets are selling more units. Add foveated rendering and other enhancements at the lower price points (rather than $1,599 like the Vive Pro Eye), and the experience could become much better.
Related: Oculus Rift: Dead in the Water?
HTC: Death of VR Greatly Exaggerated
As Sales Slide, Virtual Reality Fans Look to a Bright, Untethered Future
Virtual Reality Feels Like a Dream Gathering Dust
VR Gets Reality Check with Significant Decline in Investment
Creepy Messages Will be Found in Facebook's Oculus Touch VR Controllers
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday July 27 2018, @07:13PM (9 children)
Were people actually buying these things to begin with?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 27 2018, @07:15PM (2 children)
Virtual reality headset unit sales are slowly improving [techcrunch.com]
IDC: VR and AR headset sales expected to jump over 50% annually, hit 68.9 million in 2022 [venturebeat.com]
Nvidia Predicts 50 Million VR Headsets Sold By 2021 [uploadvr.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday July 27 2018, @08:19PM (1 child)
The next question is, how many people who bought these things are still using them a year later.
I dunno, I personally just don't get what the point of VR is. Or 3D movies. I'm just fine with the perfectly-serviceable traditional "last-gen" stuff.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Spamalope on Friday July 27 2018, @09:50PM
I only stopped using my Vive because a car accident left me unable to stand or hold the controllers without lots of pain.
Things like Fruit Ninja VR worked as an awesome cardio workout for me. I hate the gym so games with exercise built in are perfect.
It needs more improvement for general adoption. Lack of Wireless, weight, low resolution and cost are all barriers and they will all improve. Motion tracking and the controllers are good enough already. When you can do augmented reality and play VR party games it'll be everywhere, though it's hard to say how far off that is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27 2018, @07:52PM
Looking at the live feeds, the best usage VR headsets are demonstrating right now is for competitive games where reaction times and full immersion to maintain focus are required. That is, if you play a lot of shooters, fighters or racers, getting a VR headset and ignoring all the VR features only to play it conventionally with a keyboard+mouse/xbox controller can reliably improve your performance / let you play longer.
You can even go the other route and prop a bed tray over your lap for the keyboard + mouse while reclining in super-lazy mode. The latter is a good method to get the tablet-gen kids to learn touch typing as well.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 27 2018, @08:28PM (4 children)
Yes, some, obviously.
Some people also bought Apple Newtons (guilty), Virtual Boys, and Pebbles.
Some also bought iPads, PCs, and ordered from Amazon.
Time will still tell about VR. It's still largely technology waiting for a niche use case and waiting for prices to fall enough to make it mainstream.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 27 2018, @10:32PM (3 children)
Apple Newtons were great!
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday July 28 2018, @06:35AM
I prefer the fig Newtons.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday July 28 2018, @10:13AM
I hate Crapple and even I thought the Newton was pretty cool!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 30 2018, @02:54PM
They were great. They were far better than anything Palm offered until they went color, and were much better than the offerings of Windows PDAs even after color. But they were also a failed technology. It lasted 5 years of production, just long enough for the cheaper Palm to eat their lunch. A lot of people bought into them during those five years, including me. My MessagePad 2k is still around somewhere and still booted the last time I tried it, like 3-4 years ago.
Time will tell if VR will find a solid spot to be a permanent player, or just a niche that lasts awhile then goes away. (I'm sure that some form of VR will survive, and I think it has a good shot at becoming consumer-normal. But not now or today. Not dead yet, still not thriving.)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday July 27 2018, @08:36PM (1 child)
I personally can't get my head around why game designers, as soon as they want to make something for VR, seem to feel the need to throw out many of the things that make a game great: realism, longevity, expansive environments, depth and detail. Instead we have lots of overgrown tech demos and ultra short casual games. Actually, I do know some of the reasons. I know they've got to appeal to the pukers that feel too sick to play if the game goes on for too long or moves about too much -- and that rules out most of the things I listed! Add to that the fact they don't expect VR gamers to want to use their keyboard and you have ultra simplified controls as well which is almost certainly going to dumb down the game.
The problem with the above is you've then relegated VR games to the casual gamer, which is kinda stupid because the hardcore / power gamer is more likely to splash the big bucks on a VR setup. About the only saving grace is the fact that quite a few originally non-VR games can now be made to work with it.
This kind of narrow minded approach -- it's for VR therefore it has to be limited to this, this, and this -- reminds me of the same kind of philosophy that crippled so many websites, user interfaces and in some cases applications because it was supposed be better for mobile -- even though many of those things were crap even on a mobile and in the past a link to a Desktop Site was a blessing but sadly their days are numbered.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday July 27 2018, @08:59PM
Might be why Skyrim VR did so well [venturebeat.com]. It was just a port of an existing open world game. And the voice recognition for shouting gimmick was added years in advance.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27 2018, @08:50PM (6 children)
i got one ... over time.
had to assemble the rig over time because cost.
any ways it's working great.
the version 1 even has screws and those plastic tubes to drill the motion detection boxes to the wall/ceiling.
it is amazing stuff >: 0
physics works pretty aweseome!
i love the valve mini games where hand-control is a mini spaceship and "shoot the crates"!
"global warming test ball, lol"
what is goign to kill VR is things like:
-requires windows 10 (the windows VR gui thingy API baked into windows 10).
windows 7 works just fine.
there's really no reason that any new VR game should have a windows 10 OS requirment.
think about the misery of escaping to a virtual reality only to be spied on some more, away from reality, win 10 like.
leave it to ms-windblows to f#ck up the VR experience...
-HTC viveport 2 month free subscription straight out of the box.
try to redeem it and it wants a credit/debit card first .. you know 'cause 2 months are free
but will start deducting from your card details after 2 month ... if you forget to chancel it.
-m0re st0pid bitcoin mining that make video cards expensive.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 27 2018, @09:09PM (5 children)
Standalone headsets avoid the Windows environment entirely, using Android instead. So I don't think we will be stuck there.
Ultimately, we want the VR headset to be as dumb as possible... just an input device + display(s). Getting big games supported on Linux might be harder.
Possible End in Sight Seen for Cryptocurrency-Driven GPU Demand [soylentnews.org]
Bitcoin Bloodbath Nears Dot-Com Bubble Burst as Many Other Cryptocurrencies Go to Zero [soylentnews.org]
Why GPU Pricing Is About to Drop Even Further [tomshardware.com]
AMD Posts Highest Net Income In Seven Years, Fights Off Crypto Decline [tomshardware.com]
Hopefully it is close to over, or new launches will drive down prices.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27 2018, @09:56PM (4 children)
thanks for reply.
android is also very spy-i methinks.
also, i have doubts about ARM being big/good with I/O chip wise.
so far they didn't have to deal much with I/O on mobile phones.
true, there are much sensors on a smart phone but then the bandwidth requirements of these sensors is miniscule.
on x86 there are intel chips in the XEON range that go to 40 PCIe lanes and on the AMD side, in the same "server"
CPU segment they have even more bandwidth.
methinks, looking to far ahead, that with better graphics, motion tracking and haptics (suit, glove),
quick local storage access and interaction via internet more and more low latency I/O will be required.
i have tried the samsung gear VR and the VIVE and much prefer the vive experience.
also "peripherals" and "geek upgradability" favors the x86 platform for future VR.
however, i admit that the idea of just halving the screen on a smart phone and adding lenses is pretty smart ... but will probably
never win to a dedicated HMD?
also to be clear about the windows danger:
it is called "microsoft-windows-mixed-reality" and like DirectX12 is a window 10 only thing.
response time / latency is key in VR and we all know that all windows versions "age" and become slower and more sluggish.
it's like there's special code routine inside windows that makes the silicon it runs on grow binary mould or something ...
not to be too paranoid but a closed source OS does lend itself to easily implement the "planned obsolesce" paradigm.
all in all i was TOTALLY surprised at the VIVE box i bought. Everything was included. i didn't have to spend a sleepless night to
wait for the computer shop to open to go buy a "not included bluetooth adapter" or to a hardware store to try and find "mounting hocks" or such.
i opened the box, connected everything to the computer. i had a drill and the right sized drill-bit, did some measuring and go the motion boxes up and running in about 3 hours.
went to steam download steam VR and *boom* i was inside VR.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 27 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
Potentially, Android-based standalone headsets (no smartphone) could be less locked down than some smartphones. Oculus Go for instance has no cellular connection and therefore no interaction with phone carriers. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
Qualcomm is trying to take its Snapdragon ARM SoCs a little further than smartphones. Q showed off a standalone VR headset [theverge.com] with the Snapdragon 845 in it (Oculus Go uses Snapdragon 821, and Lenovo Mirage Solo [wikipedia.org] uses Snapdragon 835). They have Snapdragon 850 specifically for Windows on ARM PCs, and are rumored to be putting out a more powerful Snapdragon 1000 [soylentnews.org]. So I could see them making a SoC specifically for VR headsets that has better emphasis on I/O and latency.
As for phone-based headsets, on the YouTube VR story [soylentnews.org] I pointed to the Galaxy S9 (2960×1440, 18.5:9) and OnePlus 6 (2280×1080, 19:9). The crazy wide aspect ratios are a good thing because you want as much horizontal field-of-view as possible. The resolutions are bonkers for normal use, and there has already been a 2160p smartphone (Sony Xperia XZ2 Premium, and probably several others). So they are moving in the right direction to make Gear VR (or Cardboard) better. But AFAIK these are all limited to 60 Hz, when you want at least 90 Hz and preferably 120 Hz. The good thing about smartphone VR is that about 2 billion people have smartphones, and it's usually close by. They could carry a compact/folded phone headset with them. Although who is brave enough to be the mofo on the bus or train wearing a VR headset?
Personally, if I was going to get into PC beefy GPU + VR, I would want 6 degrees of freedom (no external sensor thingy) and no wires/tether on the headset. That means using a high speed wireless connection [soylentnews.org] such as 802.11ad (formerly known as WiGig). VESA Display Compression-M v1.1 has 5:1 "visually lossless" compression. So the maximum ~7 Gbps of WiGig becomes closer to an effective 35 Gbps, which could be enough for 4K @ 120 Hz. The AOMedia Video 1 codec [wikipedia.org] should lower bandwidth requirements compared to H.265/HEVC, and it seems to do best at high resolutions such as 2160p [bitmovin.com]. Some of these could introduce latency, but it just means that we need to improve the hardware.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @07:24PM
i think we're on the same page ... just this "no external sensor thingy".
it might sound silly to track real physical object in VR, afterall it's VR and you can create anything there ...
BUT it is awesome how you can put the VIVE hand controller on the (real) floor and in VR you see it at the correct distance,
thus if you reached for the controller in VR in real space you actually touch the controller too.
so maybe having more real physical object being tracked in VR ... is not such a bad thing.
my guess is, that you could just take a small "chip thingy" and glue it or tape it to some real object to have that
object then tracked in VR.... maybe a small device like those amazon click-to-order-one-thing devices?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
I am sort of confused about the whole "stand alone avoids... '*OS*' problems entirely"
Giving me the solution of using Android, what we can likely agree is/was the first commercially successful spyware OS built for the purpose of advertising and that they knew no one would buy that so they gave it away for free... instead of Windows 10, which decided that tactic would work except they couldn't give it away reliably and forced it on anyone that couldn't resist even if they said no, really doesn't inspire enthusiasm or the desire to give them my money. Christ, even the eye tracking stuff available is just going to track what I looked at to make sure I get ads for it later on something else.
I have different older VR glasses that still see use on occasion (RCA, VGA, and S-Video input is not modern, but it is backwards compatible..). Many older games can sometimes surprise you even if they don't support VR, and some older games that are still fun and were designed for it (Descent, Mechwarrior 2, Magic Carpet 2 [which admittedly was not as popular as it should have been]) still are very fun on occasion. Descent has more longevity in the same way the original Doom and clones of Doom have replayability.
And they work just fine with DVD player, tv out put, etc. Even VCRs, which don't seem to have any OS vendor lock-in requirements.
Games that weren't designed for the older glasses can still provide immersion,
Also, winamp visualizations still looks good on them!
no windows is required unless you want windows games. no specific console is required unless you want that console's games.
There's just no way I am going to get a facebook account to play games. There's no way I am going to get windows 10 just to play games. and even if the android OS that controls some new VR glasses is somehow secured, it's like saying it's alright when it phones home it's encrypted for your safety and no you can't look at what its transmitting because Cloud.
I can only hope that Valve comes out with a Steam OS (that doesn't suck like their new chat client--so I am probably screwed and have to decide on either to discover girls or keep trying to play other types of games know I will at least be screwed that way).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @07:28PM
i remember these from old VR v.1 times. there was also a sony "headset" that replaced a monitor.
but i was poor (a kid) in those times so never got to play around with it ...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Appalbarry on Friday July 27 2018, @09:16PM (1 child)
Aside from games, and some specific niche uses, VR goggles will suffer the same fate as 3D TV: after the first couple of weeks the thrill of "Oh Wow! Look at this!" will be exceeded by the "Naw, too much hassle to bother today."
Most people just don't want to be forced to hang stuff on their heads just to watch a movie or play a game. And given the temperature and humidity in many places this month that's even more true. Sweat in your eyes sucks.
If there's one lesson to be learned from the tech industry over the last couple of decades, it's that you should never underestimate tech-bros capacity to invent stuff that no-one needs, and even fewer want, no matter how shiney-shiney it is.
And equally, the willingness of VC types and the tech press to buy into the hype.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday July 28 2018, @12:41AM
https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/sweating-headset-not-big-deal-manage/ [vrfitnessinsider.com]
If this thing could be applied to headsets, it could also be a winner: HP Announces Headphones With Thermoelectric Cooling [soylentnews.org]
3D TV is a bit different than VR. There's very little 3D stereoscopic content. You end up using your TV for 2D stuff and forget the glasses. The VR headset is its own display. You can use it to do 2D, 3D/360°. There's a growing amount of compatible games and 360-degree videos. You could use it to create virtual desktops spanning your field of view. Etc.
Can't elaborate any more than that right now.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 27 2018, @11:43PM
Imho and experience, VR's adoption problem is a marketing problem. It's difficult to convey the VR experience in 2D marketing.
My daughter (0xD) had zero desire to try VR. I had to bribe her to get her to try it. After 15 minutes in an Oculus she's saving to buy one.