HTC opened up orders in Europe today for their latest VR headset, Vive Pro Eye, a version of the company’s enterprise headset with integrated eye-tracking. HTC also opened up pre-orders in China too, with launch slated for May 24th; there’s no word on when to expect it in North America though.

Coming in at a eye-watering €1,708 (~$1,900) for the full system, Vive Pro Eye includes the entire kit and caboodle hardware-wise: Vive Pro Eye headset, link box, two Vive controllers, two SteamVR 2.0 base stations, adapters, cables, etc—everything you need (minus a capable computer) to get you up and running.

It seems the company isn’t selling the headset on its lonesome though, so you’ll need to go all-in if you’re looking to mess with the device’s admittedly pretty compelling eye-tracking solution, which was created by Swedish eye-tracking stalwarts Tobii.

Image courtesy HTC

To be clear, the €1,708 is an upfront cost with Europe’s included  value-added tax (VAT) that private consumers are obligated to pay. Registered businesses however (very much the target audience) might be able to reclaim the ~23% VAT on their taxes, effectively making the whole system cost €1,389 pre-VAT. HTC prominently advertises the reduced price on their enterprise-facing site.

For €230 more, businesses can spring for an additional support package that includes a two-year limited warranty for commercial use, premium service & expedited repair, and enterprise portal access.

You might be wondering why it’s only available in Europe and China for now. HTC is staying mum on the subject, and hasn’t released info on when to expect it in North America (or at what price), however one explanation could be the recently escalated trade war with China, which has seen reciprocal tariffs of 25% levied on many goods traveling to and from both countries. The company may wait to see how it plays out, as they would likely have to eat the cost of the tariff so it doesn’t dramatically impact the final price in the US. This is however just healthy conjecture, and it could be that a North America roll-out is simply being staggered to help estimate potential demand.

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In respects to pricing, both Europe and China are pretty similar, with pre-orders opening in China today for ¥13,888 (~$2,018), VAT included. Considering taxes in the US vary from state-to-state, and are significantly lower overall in comparison to either Europe or China’s VAT system, it could mean US pricing may differ when it eventually comes farther westward.

First announced at CES 2019, Vive Pro Eye was presented in a press conference where we got to go hands-on with the headset, taking in a veritable buffet of use-cases from the company’s early enterprise partners.

We got a chance to see some basic foveated rendering, user-intent analysis, and gaze-based interactions—all done to a reasonably good effect. Besides eye-tracking, not much else has changed about Vive Pro Eye, so if you’re interested to see what ultimately sets it apart from the first HTC Vive, check out our in-depth review of Vive Pro here.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • 3872Orcs

    I have no confidence in this being a solid product.

    I’m tired of having to deal with half baked products from HTC. I’ve had the original Vive from when it first launched as well as Vive Pro and the wireless adapter. When everything works it’s great but there’s enough irritations and limitations with their hardware that I’m jumping ship for good. Wireless gives me lots of grey screens and disconnects at totally random and the trackpads on the wands are easily broken. Vive Pro cable is of a proprietary type and it broke after about two months or so of use with what I would consider normal use. If I want to replace the cable I can either deal with the their support from hell or buy a new one at extortion prices.

    Here’s hoping Valve Index will be much better! Good riddance HTC.

    • Marcin Stachowiak

      Just as a counter argument, I have my vive since it was originally launched, it has been dropped, stepped on and tortured by kids almost daily. I also have pro wireless at my office and have no issues at all, nothing ever broke. My wish would be better lens and higher resolution.

    • Anders Eismann

      Same here – my HTC Vive Pro is smashed to the walls, people have fallen down, hitting strongly floor and it still works and no cracks anywhere. Same story with remote controllers – how many times they have hit concrete walls, floors and seals, still working like new ones. Pretty solid procuct in every way but how much I wish more wider field of few and little more clearer picture and of course refreshrate would be nice to have higher than 90 FPS. Thanks god Valve Index coming handy, cant wait.

  • Jan Ciger

    Small but important corrections:

    – VAT varies country by country, from the low 17% in Luxemburg up to 25% in Denmark, Sweden and Croatia. Only Poland, Portugal and Ireland have 23% (see:
    https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/resources/documents/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/rates/vat_rates_en.pdf )

    – For commercial users the “Advantage” commercial warranty is **obligatory** unless you want to buy the kit only for something that would be considered “non-commercial use”. So that’s some 200 EUR on top of the sticker price.

    It is a pricey gadget that is intended/makes sense only for people that actually need to collect eye tracking data – e.g. for research, ergonomics evaluation or medical purposes (such as some phobia treatments benefit from having this data available). It is decidedly not a consumer or even general purpose industrial/enterprise product, same as the former (now owned by Apple and shut down) SMI add-on kits for Oculus Rift.

  • Interesting gadget, also considering that the Tobii devkit with original Vive costed more than $7000. These trade wars anyway are creating a lot of problems…

    • Oh buy, importing Vive Pro Eye from China. Wonder how much that’ll cost.

  • Justos

    With the index and Rift S coming out, you would think HTC would lower their prices even just a little bit. This is DOA for consumers.

  • Nicholas

    I don’t think that there will be many (if any) games supporting eye tracking for quite some time. Buying this headset is therefore completely pointless from a consumer perspective. Guess I’ll sell my rift and go for the HP reverb and enjoy the sharpness as long as my future 2080 Ti equivalent armed computer holds up. Then switch for another headset which has eye tracking when the tech has become adopted by game developers.

    • How you feel about the Index?

      • Niklas Fritzell

        What I like about the index is higher fov and the knuckles controllers. The onboard audio is also an interesting concept, which I believe will make the headset more immersive. What I don’t like is the relatively low resolution which will result in a lower pixel per inch when the higher fov is taken into account. Gaming on this will most likely be the top experience out of all vr solutions, but I am mostly a casual VR user nowadays. Short experiences and movies are my thing now. Therefore the reverb attracts me more for the time being with its much lower pricepoint. Why? Because it will be suuuper sharp :)

        • Moe Curley

          Yeah the PPD is concerning but if they have been able to eliminate the screen door at this resolution (as others seem to have achieved) then Index is the dark horse.

    • jj

      I think there will be many if not all games that support eye tracking. its really crazy to use and 100% feels like the pc is tapped into your brain. I work with the tobii eye trackers at work and was very quickly convinced eye tracking will be huge in the future.

      also foveated rendering is huge

    • Ugur Ister

      eye tracking for foveated rendering will be supported broadly.
      For example Nvidia and HTC announced their coop on it earlier this year:
      https://uploadvr.com/ces-2019-nvidia-htc-partner/
      and it is getting adopted and implemented by all big players, graphics card makers, headset makers and the major engines.
      We’ll have to see when it will be supported by all games, but that it is coming is pretty much granted.

  • JesperL

    DOA!
    A feature that no consumer can use for anything, at a price that is a completely joke. Do HTC even look at the competition?
    They did so well with Vive, and then it seem like they got a collective brain truma..

    • FireAndTheVoid

      This isn’t meant for consumers. It’s meant for devs and engineering companies to try and make use of the eye tracking features. There are two ways you can tell this:
      1. The Vive Pro resolution isn’t so high that it demands foveated rendering. Even a last gen GPU like the 1080 Ti can output the full resolution of the Vive Pro and, in many cases, with supersampling just fine.
      2. There aren’t any games that make use of eye tracking.

      There is no point for a consumer to buy this, but that wasn’t their intent. It’s to get the tech out there for people to experiment with, so that software that leverages it will be ready for the next generation of headsets. Because there isn’t a consumer market for this, they didn’t bother pricing it to capture the consumer market.

      • mirak

        Yes there is a consumer market, otherwise they wouldn’t make it available to consummers.
        The point is that if you really need it you can buy it, if you have that kind of money to spend.

    • Let the businesses blow their money on this. HTC is giving folks that buy the Index free Viveport for a while.

      It doesn’t get any more obvious :3

      (look up the deal before buying)

  • Andres Velasco

    Flop

  • M0rph3u5

    £1500 for the full kit with their dated controllers.. No thank you, happy for my Index order, saving £600 which I could well use to buy Oculus Galaxy as well

  • M0rph3u5

    No thanks… I am happy with my Valve index order, and the £600 that I am saving could be used to buy oculus quest.. Eye tracking perhaps in few years would be the norm

    • mirak

      If you got the Vive Pro Eye you would buy the Quest anyway.
      If you think that’s saved money, then it means you don’t really need the Quest.
      So you will waste saved money on something you don’t really need.
      This makes no sense.

      • M0rph3u5

        well if you are buying both at launch, then probably your concept for “saving money” must be slightly off. The point that I was making that its ridiculously OP for such a minor tweak. The Vive pro was released over a year ago and since then many HMDs were released with similar and even higher resolution specs at more competitive price(s). If you ask me, it is HTC logic that makes no sense!

  • Imagine the import fees from China :3

    Wonder what total cost is.

  • oompah

    good price is 400$

  • brubble

    Pfft… HTC could release the hmd of the decade and I still wouldn’t give them my money.

  • jj

    Its clear none of you have tried eye tracking in vr or even just with tobii on ur pc… its a whole other level of interaction, literally feels like the pc is reading your mind. this is way too much though, but most of you are saying eye tracking is pointless and wont ever be used. it will be huge in the future, id bet everything on it.

  • Jeremiah

    Would the tarrifs effect HTC though, as they are a Taiwanese company and as we all know, Taiwan is a separate country from China!

    • mirak

      It’s not a separate country.

      • Jeremiah

        Not if the evil Communist government of China has their way, I suppose. I guarantee the government and people of Taiwan see themselves as separate, God help them.

        • mirak

          No, they consider themselves as owner of the whole China.
          They are the Republic of China, and China is the Popular Republic of China.
          They both claim control over each other.
          UN consider Taiwan as province of China.

          • Jeremiah

            I know that’s how the evil Communist government of China see things, doesn’t mean it has any bearing on reality, they often like to rewrite history to suit their needs and they don’t care who they have to step on in the process. If they have their way, they will eventually swallow up the whole of Asia and then the World, don’t you see it?!

            They are bullies and I’m glad the US finally has a government that willing to stand up to them, I know for a fact that Taiwan is very glad.

          • mirak

            US is bullying the whole world for 70 years now, and you don’t even acknowledge it, it’s really pathetic.

          • Jeremiah

            There’s probably some truth to that, I fail to see another superpower that has been as benevolent in world history though, God knows China wouldn’t be nearly as tolerant if the roles were reversed. Here’s to that never happening. I’m not American BTW, so that’s clear.

          • mirak

            US only do things for their own interest, luckily some interest are commons like having some type of freedom, but if removing a dictator is in their own financial interest, they will do it, and use freedom as a pretext, even if it will kill millions of people and turn a whole region to hell.
            That’s what happened to Irak that turned into Isis.
            I am French and I consider the same logic turned Libya to shit, by having our army removing Khadafi.

            I don’t think US are good, we just happen to already be allies, and have clearly no other choices anyway.

            So yes according to US you are free unless you go against their interest, like Assange or Snowden.
            There is so many reason to not see the US as good people.
            The main reason is that they really believe they are the good people.

          • Jeremiah

            Ah you’re French, I think the EU is one of the greatest evils on the planet right now. We’re not going to see eye to eye regarding the US. They wouldn’t kill millions, but I wouldn’t put it past the EU or China! France sells arms to evil nations, I’d say they are far worse actually, just much weaker.

            It’s complicated in the US obviously. Certainly they’ve gone amiss since after WWII. That is because they’ve moved off of the excellent foundation of their constitution and Christianity.

            That is changing under Trump though. With that and us in the UK leaving the soon to collapse EU, the world is starting to make sense again ;)

  • Moe Curley

    If they were going to include eye tracking WHY did they not go for a higher res screen? Foviated Rendering where no matter where you look there’s screen door!?

    • mirak

      For 3000 thousands euros ? xD

  • Ugur Ister

    I hope HTC does well in their niche they carved for themselves in the pro/arcade space and can continue to do their thing and then over time lower the prices for the cool stuff once possible to do so.
    I hear/read many blame them for way higher pricing than Oculus etc, but it is in my eyes not a reasonable comparison. They offer quite different things so of course the price is different and then on top Oculus is backed by FB who basically massively invests there to be able to sell the headsets at as low price as possible to broaden the userbase asap.
    Of course a company like HTC who does all on their own with no such behemoth backing can not do that, they have to make a profit on their hardware, or, well, they can’t sell that hardware anymore.
    So yeah, i don’t blame them for the price, but i just can’t afford it.
    I got the first Vive (i also have the Rift and a bunch of other headsets) and i appreciate that they pushed into VR so boldly with Valve when few others did and also with many quite forward thinking aspects.
    Like for example the Vive wands with full 6 dof tracking were unmatched by anyone else until the Rift got its touch controllers.
    Still now, arguably the base stations based tracking, while more setup and maintenance hassle involving than inside out tracking, is hands down the fastest, most precise and most reliable tracking solution out there, and with smallest dead spot areas.
    (not talking the Quest or Rift tracking down, i tried the Quest tracking and it works great and i ordered a Quest, too, just listing the facts =) )

    The problem i personally have is, and i think many others have is: The newer PC headset offerings by HTC are just all in price regions which are already not affordable anymore to most consumers, even to most enthusiasts.

    I think it is very cool HTC pushes as first with eye tracking built in on the market and i’m looking forward to see dynamic foveated rendering got going there soon, as tech and VR enthusiast it is something super cool we have been wanting for years, but to me personally, the price is just way too much.

    As i said, i already had a Vive (which i bought), and so i then just ordered the Valve Index headset, so i can use that with the knuckles and my existing base stations then.

    The Vive Pro Eye would have been an interesting candidate for me if it would have cost 1k, not 1700.

    Again, i understand why they have to charge more, so i hope they can just do well in the pro market until over time as hardware parts costs come down, they can lower their prices for those headsets, too.

    If one is a wealthy super enthusiast or an Arcade or other business owner in the field, i can see the use case though, then it is more easily written off as business expense and also once dynamic foveated rendering is broadly supported then maybe one needs less super high end graphics cards or if one gets them can then achieve better look in the focussed area thanks to rendering everything outside the focussed area at lower res.

  • Lucidfeuer

    I’ve never seen or heard anyone, working in VR or in companies, have any interest for the Vive Pro. What are you trying to sell?