People are going gaga over HTC’s Vive VR, it appears. The Taiwanese company sold over 15,000 units of the HTC Vive virtual reality headset in the first 10 minutes of its pre-orders opening on Monday, an executive with HTC said.
HTC began accepting pre-orders for its head-mounted VR gadget on February 29. Earlier this week, the company also revealed the international pricing for the HTC Vive, and support for PayPal service. Shen Ye, an HTC executive who works for the company’s VR division, shared the sales figures on Twitter.
While it isn’t a staggering figure, it does indicate users’ interest in HTC’s Vive, and in virtual reality headsets in general. Also on the same day, Microsoft’s HoloLens Developer Edition became available for purchase. The HoloLens, which is an augmented reality device, is priced at $3,000 (roughly Rs. 203,000) whereas HTC’s Vive costs $799 (roughly Rs. 54,000) in the United States. That means HTC sold $12 million worth of headsets in 10 minutes.
The HTC Vive also requires a high-end PC to run it, which makes the headset unfit for many. The company recently published the minimum system requirements for its HTC Vive: Intel Core i5-4590 / AMD FX 8350 equivalent or better, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or better, 4GB of RAM, and more. The Vive headset features a front-facing camera, an integrated microphone, Bluetooth connectivity, and HTC is also touting a new feature called Vive Phone Services, giving users access to phone features such as making or receiving phone calls, reading text messages, seeing calendar invites, and more.
The Vive headset ships with two wireless controllers, two Lighthouse laser base stations for room-based motion tracking, a hub to collect data and send it to the PC, and two games – Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives by Owlchemy Labs, and Fantastic Corporation by Northway Games. The company announced that Google’s Tilt Brush, the VR counterpart of an image editing app such as Microsoft Paint will also be available for the people who place their order soon.
While VR space is still in its nascent phase, many big companies are betting their money on it to become a frontrunner in this category. Facebook-owned Oculus will begin shipping its Oculus VR on March 28. Google is also expected to make some VR announcement at its upcoming developer conference.
[“source-ndtv”]