With a flurry of new headsets hitting the market, news about the next consumer headset from one of VR’s leading players, HTC, has been notably absent. Though pricing and a release date for Vive Cosmos hasn’t been revealed in full just yet, the company recently indicated that it expects to launch in Q3.
HTC revealed Vive Cosmos back in January, but wasn’t ready to say much about it, let alone let anyone actually try it. It’s been five months since then, but the company still hasn’t revealed even basic info about the headset like resolution, field of view, weight, price, or release date. And while we know that the headset will be compatible with PCs, the company has also teased that it will be able to plug into a smartphone, but has yet to offer details on how that will work.
Back at the initial reveal in January, HTC said that it planned to first offer Vive Cosmos dev kits in “early 2019,” and that the finished headset would launch later in the year. To our knowledge, dev kits have yet to be made available.
VR developer and blogger Antony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo recently visited HTC’s headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan and spoke to members of the company’s Vive team. Though he found they were still not ready to share any details about the headset, he was told that the current expected release date for Vive Cosmos is Q3, 2019.
Vitillo wrote that a spokesperson told him the company was a “bit on a different schedule than the one announced at CES.” That makes it somewhat unclear if HTC was talking about the release of the Cosmos dev kit or the finished headset, though we followed up with Vitillo who said he was specifically asking about the finished headset. We’ve also reached out to HTC for the latest info on their release plans for Cosmos.
During his visit, HTC also told Vitillo that Cosmos will have a wireless adapter, though it isn’t clear if that will be the existing Vive Wireless Adapter or some other solution.
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While Valve developed much of the technology behind the original Vive, the company partnered to bring it to market under HTC’s stewardship. Valve is now set to launch its very own VR headset, the Valve Index, which in many ways puts the companies in direct competition.
This is likely why HTC appears to be distancing itself from Valve. Cosmos is the first PC VR headset from HTC which won’t use Valve’s SteamVR Tracking technology, and while the headset will support SteamVR, it sounds like HTC plans to make its own Viveport storefront the default platform for the headset.