Daniel O’Brien is the Vice President of Business Planning and Management for Virtual Reality at HTC. I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX Prime in the HTV Vive private demo area. Daniel talks about the first time that he tried Valve’s room-scale VR, and some of the story for how the collaboration between Valve and HTC began.
Daniel talks about how creating the Vive has been a true collaboration between Valve and HTC, and that they don’t like to get too much into the details of who did what because they’ve both had a part in creating the hardware and software for both the developer kits and final consumer version.
Daniel said that there will be some upcoming announcements with more information on the final consumer product as well as the timing of the release. He said that there would be a limited quantity at the end of this year, but didn’t specify whether that limited quantity would be available to the general public or released to specific developers. More details on the target release dates and some more details on the final specifications, as well as some of the extended capabilities, should be coming soon.
I asked Daniel if he thought that the initial HTC Vive experiences would primarily be games, and he did say that he expected that a lot of the initial experiences and innovations would be coming from the gaming market. But he expects that there will also be a healthy ecosystem of non-gaming applications that will be emerging within the next couple of years. He didn’t specify how many dev kits have already been distributed or what percentage were sent to non-gaming applications, but it does sound like there will be some non-gaming applications released for the Vive as well.
Finally, Daniel talks about the some of the marketing initiatives for the HTC Vive, and that it’s not something that you can read about in a magazine to understand it. They’re dedicated to providing opportunities for people to experience room-scale VR first-hand with their World Tour, as well as going to various tech events.
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