L’auricolare standalone di HTC è un’evoluzione per la realtà virtuale

Realta virtuale le cuffie sono cambiate parecchio negli ultimi dieci anni, per lo più diventando più potenti e più costose. HTC Vive XR Elite, come il recente Meta Quest Pro e possibilmente di Apple dispositivo atteso pone la domanda: siamo davvero pronti per l’ascesa delle piattaforme VR da oltre 1.000 dollari?

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Super Small Vive XR Elite Doesn’t Quite Work For My Eyes

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The $1,099 headset, available for preorder Thursday, is arriving by the end of February — remarkably soon for a CES product. That means it’ll be available alongside Sony’s PlayStation 5-connected PSVR 2. While less expensive than the Quest Pro, the XR Elite’s price costs about as much as buying a PS5 and a PSVR 2 together. It’s far from an impulse purchase. But the hardware, which shrinks down the VR form to a pair of nearly glasses-like goggles and includes mixed-reality capabilities that could allow for AR apps, looks to solve how we’ll be using the metaverse for more in our lives than just games, simulation and fitness.

Read more: The Wonders of CES 2023: 3D Laptops, Wireless TV and Shape-Shifting Screens

No other company has really cracked this challenge either. But this Vive headset looks, more than ever, like it’s a stepping stone to future AR glasses.

“We see where mixed reality is going to create a whole new suite of use cases. We know the virtual reality use cases are great. I think the AR side is amazing, too,” Dan O’Brien, HTC’s general manager of Vive, told me in a conversation at CES in Las Vegas. He acknowledged that HTC tried to make an AR device in 2015 but stopped because of the complications. O’Brien sees 5G and cloud computing as a key next step. “You need a 5G network, a really robust one to make AR go to scale — you need a cloud infrastructure to deliver to those types of wearables.”

The XR Elite is primarily a standalone VR headset, and it looks like an impressive piece of tech: It has a familiar Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip much like the Meta Quest 2, Quest Pro and Vive’s existing business-focused Focus 3. But it adds a higher-resolution 110-degree field of view, LCD displays with 2K resolution per eye that can run at 90Hz. There’s also a boosted 12GB of RAM along with 128GB of storage. It can connect to PCs to run SteamVR or HTC’s VivePort software, or connect with Android phones. But its potential as a bridge to AR experiences seems like the most impressive feature.

Those are just specs, though. The XR Elite is a VR headset with a similar proposition to previous models, but with expanded capabilities. Its compact size is the most surprising part: At 340 grams, it’s less than half the weight of the Quest Pro. The rear hot-swappable battery gives about two hours of life. It gets even smaller by unclipping the back battery strap and adding glasses arms that can turn the headset into a modified pair of VR glasses, which could just plug into an external USB-C charger or battery for power. It’s small enough to fit in a compact carrying case tube.

But that compact size comes with a twist: Instead of fitting on top of glasses, the XR Elite uses adjusting dials, or diopters, which can change the lens prescription on the fly without you needing to wear glasses at all — for some people, at least. The diopters only accommodate up to a -6 prescription, but my own vision is over -8 for nearsightedness. It’s a challenge HTC faced with its even smaller Vive Flow phone-connected VR goggles, which also went for the glasses-free approach.

The XR Elite has a dedicated depth sensor on the front, along with color passthrough cameras that can eventually show mixed reality-experiences, similar to the Quest Pro. The Quest Pro doesn’t have the Elite’s added depth sensor, but it accommodates for that with its onboard cameras.

The XR Elite could also adapt further. While the hardware doesn’t have its own eye-tracking tools onboard, eye- and face-tracking add-ons are coming later in the year. The headset’s controllers are the same standard ones that HTC has for the Vive Focus 3, which follow the same game controller-like playbook as the Meta Quest 2 and others. But HTC already has its own line of wearable VR body trackers and wristbands, and more accessories could follow.

O’Brien acknowledges that the sticky, mass-market appeal of VR and AR aren’t here yet. “I think developers will be using cloud computing, being able to actually get their content into the metaverse much faster, and much more efficiently,” he said. “If you think about the streaming business, these streamers, these TikTokkers, all these kids that create the really compelling, fun experiences that just keep drawing you back in? That’s not in the metaverse today, We need to create more opportunities for less sophisticated immersive content creators to get involved, and then create more [of an] economia.”

O’Brien vede il cloud computing, guidato dalla capacità del tracciamento oculare di comprimere i dati grafici tramite una tecnologia chiamata rendering foveated, come un modo per ridurre alla fine i processori sui visori futuri, diventando più piccoli e adattandosi a più persone.

La mia preoccupazione riguarda le opzioni di prescrizione limitate al momento. “Man mano che arriviamo a occhiali molto più leggeri, le persone probabilmente porteranno più delle loro prescrizioni in futuro”, afferma O’Brien. “Per ora, quello che possiamo fare è solo cercare di affrontare la maggior parte del mercato nel miglior modo possibile con questi tipi di modifiche alle impostazioni, perché dobbiamo rendere le cuffie più leggere. Dobbiamo renderle più comode. E se avrai queste grandi aree di sollievo per gli occhi all’interno di questi visori, rimarranno davvero grandi”.

O’Brien vede che i controller VR inclusi potrebbero diventare opzionali un giorno, forse anche essere lasciati fuori dalla scatola e acquistati separatamente, ma non ancora. Il monitoraggio delle mani non è abbastanza affidabile. “Il tracciamento delle mani deve fare enormi progressi nei prossimi due o tre anni per diventare davvero uno strumento di input molto più naturale”. Ma O’Brien suggerisce che è un modo per i futuri auricolari di diventare più convenienti. “Se un utente può semplicemente indossare gli occhiali e interagire con i contenuti [with their hands]sarà un prodotto molto meno costoso.”

Questo prodotto è stato selezionato come uno dei migliori prodotti del CES 2023. Dai un’occhiata all’altro I migliori vincitori del premio CES 2023.