Last year HTC teased the VR world ahead of CES 2018 about what would become the announcement of the Vive Pro. Now the company is at it again, promising “new gear” that will be revealed at CES 2019 next week.
We’re a little less than a week from the start of CES 2019, the massive annual consumer tech show in Vegas. Road to VR will be boots on the ground once again to bring you the most important developments, including whatever HTC has up their sleeve.
Last year it was the reveal of the Vive Pro, the pricey but otherwise well refined headset that launched later in the year. This year something else is cooking, and HTC took to Twitter to tease us ahead of a reveal next week:
“The truck is loaded and we’re excited be on our way to #CES2019. The cases are packed with some new gear we can’t wait to unbox for you,” the tweet reads.
Notably, the three big crates shown in the photo represent Vive, Viveport, and a third one which is Vive something, with the second word intentionally blurred out.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but the big blue Vive logo prop seen in the photo—with its starry center—reminds us of the ‘Vive Cosmos’ headset trademark the company filed in late 2018. Indeed, the blurred wording on the third create looks like it could read COSMOS in all caps, but it’s tough to say definitely.
More importantly than what the crate says is what’s inside. HTC could be revealing a consumer-ready standalone headset to compete with Oculus’ upcoming Quest headset. HTC of course already has the Vive Focus, though it’s long remained a dev kit everywhere but China where it launched almost a year ago. The bulky 6DOF controller dev kit add-on for the Focus tells us too that the headset wasn’t designed with 6DOF hand input in mind—a defining feature of Quest—which will need to be more seamlessly integrated to compete with Oculus’ offering.
HTC is not expected to reveal a new PC VR headset this soon, unless it turns out the company is collaborating once again with Valve on the recently leaked headset, as they did in the first place with the original Vive. Plausible, but unlikely for CES next week by our reading.
We’ll be at CES to find out exactly what HTC is showing, stay tuned!