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HTC’s Vive VR system goes on pre-order Feb. 29

And the race to the release of virtual reality is officially on.

 

Dennis Scimeca

Tech

Posted on Jan 11, 2016   Updated on May 27, 2021, 9:24 am CDT

Get ready for your wallet to be a heck of a lot lighter if you want to get on board with room-scale VR.

Hot on the heels of Oculus opening pre-orders for the Oculus Rift on Jan. 6, HTC CEO Cher Wang has announced that pre-orders for the Vive virtual reality system will open on Feb. 29. according to The Telegraph.

That means we’ll also likely find out the price for the PC-based virtual reality solution. And Vive, developed by HTC in partnership with Valve Software,  could be priced even higher than the $600 Rift.

While the Rift is designed to primarily to support seated VR experiences using an Xbox One control pad, the Vive is designed for room-scale VR in which the user is standing and has more freedom of movement.

That means the Vive requires a pair of sensors to read the dimensions of a room and a pair of hand controllers for the user—control pads don’t work as well when you’re standing up. That’s a significant amount of additional hardware besides the Vive headset itself, and there’s no reason to expect it will be cheap.

HTC recently unveiled an upgrade to the first-generation Vive hardware at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. The upgrade includes a forward-facing camera so the user can switch between the real and virtual worlds while they are inside a VR simulation. The hand controllers have also been updated.

Illustration via HTC

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*First Published: Jan 11, 2016, 5:16 pm CST