Vive Focus 3 Announced with Snapdragon XR2, 6MP Resolution, $1,300 Enterprise Price & June 27th Launch

Absolutely. There’s a difference between being disappointed and declaring that the company has made a mistake, or the product is too expensive. I WANT a Quest 2 competitor, and I hoped that HTC would announce one. They didn’t, which is a bit of a bummer, but that doesn’t make the Focus 3 a bad or too-expensive product. It’s just not for me.

The thing that you prefer is not necessarily the thing that would make HTC more money. You simply don’t know that, and like all of the people who compare an enterprise product to a consumer product and complain that it’s too expensive, you’re simply ignoring that this isn’t a product targeted to you and you don’t have any special information about why HTC made that decision. Maybe this product will fail, or maybe it will succeed, but whether it does or doesn’t won’t turn on the fact that you’d rather that there was a Quest 2 competitor in the world.

But I didn’t say whether they’d make more or less money because I don’t know. My point is the every time some company releases an enterprise headset people run to the comments to say that the company is making a big mistake, that the headset is too expensive, and that said company clearly doesn’t like to make money. These comments are almost universally devoid of any actual information about the enterprise sector or the customers who are choosing between enterprise headsets. Most of these commenters simply assert, with no evidence or reason to actually believe that they are correct, that 1) the company is capable of releasing a VR headset at some price that the commenter thinks is a good price, and 2) that doing so would surely make more money for the company than a more expensive enterprise focused headset.

As for comparing an enterprise headset to a mass market one, you basically did. Your comment referred to HTC releasing a headset for $200 more than the Quest 2, which would result in “people” buying the headset because they “don’t sell your data”. You said that this is what you personally would prefer, and that this strategy would make “a lot more monies”.

In this comment you admit that you don’t know whether releasing a consumer device instead of an enterprise focused device would make more money, but then say that it’s a “safe bet” that they would because the enterprise market is tiny. You have not provided any reason to believe that they would sell more headsets with a Quest 2 competitor, or, and this is important, that they would make more money doing so. It’s entirely possible that HTC simply doesn’t have the capacity to release a mass market device like the Quest 2, or that they couldn’t do so profitably. You almost certainly don’t know enough about their business or this industry segment in general to make the prognostications that you are making, or if you do you haven’t supplied that information in your comment, which would actually make it useful to people.

You simply don’t know that this was the “worst option available to them”, nor do you know that they are in a position to release a mass market product instead of what they’re choosing to release. You’re talking out of your ass.

Not the opposite. XR2 wasn’t “designed” according to Oculus wishes, more “configured” according to Oculus recommendations. Oculus/Qualcomm cooperation goes back to the Gear VR/Galaxy Note 4 days. There are many Carmack talks about his attempts to get Qualcomm to make even minor changes for VR, often fruitless, because it didn’t fit their mobile strategy. There is a very interesting talk about what it took him to get 5K 360º video to run on the Go, because the Qualcomm engineers insisted that it wasn’t possible and therefore weren’t willing to give him the necessary access.

The XR1 and XR2 are different from typical mobile SoCs, because they are aimed at XR devices, but they are mainly reconfigurations of existing mobile SoCs. The Snapdragon 865 was their 2020 top tier smart phone chip, the Adreno GPU is designed for gaming on phones, the Hexagon DSP that did all the tracking on the Quest 1 was introduced for audio and camera processing. The Hexagon in the SD820 was used on Daydream to remove the need for external gyroscope sensors.

None of these components were changed for the XR2. Core differences are in other areas like power management, because phone SoCs are intended for use with short power peaks, while VR requires consistent performance. Qualcomm of course cooperated intensively with Oculus about what they needed for a stand-alone VR HMD, due to a) their experience and b) Oculus being their main customer for the XR2, but that doesn’t mean that Qualcomm created the XR2 from scratch for Oculus. They basically repackaged their existing SoC in a more fitting configuration.

Hard disagree. VR is not going to move forward because of video games. If that were the case, Personal Computers would have taken off in the early 80’s. The ONLY thing that will boost VR is mainstream adoption. Once VR HMDs can do things our phones, PCs and TVs can do AND add another layer of immersion then we will see the industry move forward as more than a gimmick to play video games.

That’s exactly my point and you missed iit. Consoles in the 70s and 80s WERE NOT PCs and the console market completely died for a few years in 1983, not to be revived until the original Nintendo came out. Actual PCs, like the Apple II and original IBM machines were not commonplace until they were adopted by BUSINESSES in the late 80s/early 90s.

Video games weren’t commonplace in homes in the 80’s, so why would gaming, which was pretty cheesy, require a PC? People went to arcades to play games until consoles became used more. Once more serious games came out that needed more horsepower, PC’s became the only way to run them. It was MS Flight Simulator that caused me to get my first 286. The consoles couldn’t keep up. Where are the arcades now?