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HTC Brings OpenXR Public Beta to Vive Focus 3

From roadtovr

HTC announced this week it is making available an OpenXR public beta for the Vive Focus 3. OpenXR is designed to make it easier for developers to create a single app that’s cross-compatible with multiple OpenXR-supporting headsets.

OpenXR is a royalty-free standard that aims to standardize the development of XR applications, making hardware and software more interoperable. In the best case scenario, an app built to be compliant with OpenXR can run on any OpenXR-supporting headset with no changes to its underlying code.

Image courtesy Khronos Group

OpenXR has seen a slow but steady adoption since reaching version ‘1.0’ in 2019, and picked up significant steam in 2021 with official support on SteamVR, Meta going “all in” on OpenXR, “production-ready” OpenXR support in Unreal Engine, and more.

And now HTC’s latest enterprise-focused standalone headset, Vive Focus 3, has moved significantly closer to the finish line. The company announced this week that it’s ready for developers to test out the headset’s OpenXR support through a public beta.

“We’re committed to enabling the developer community to build the content and applications that power experiences across the spectrum of reality,” said Dario Laverde, Director of Developer Relations at HTC Vive. “With OpenXR, more developers will be able to bring their content to Vive Focus 3, and users will benefit from an expanded app library and more flexibility in terms of how they consume content. We strongly believe it’s a win for the XR industry as a whole.”

Now that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to buy Quest applications and run them on Vive Focus 3… but it does mean that developers should have a much easier time porting their apps to run on Vive Focus 3, if they choose to offer their apps on the headset.

Developers interested in using OpenXR on Vive Focus 3 can find instructions for joining the public beta and using the standard in Unity at HTC’s developer forum.

HTC is Getting into the NFT Craze with the Opening of Its Own Store Soon

From roadtovr

HTC is opening a non-fungible token (NFT) store soon that its says will host all forms of digital art, including AR, VR, and XR pieces.

The store, which will open on December 17th, is set to first offer NFTs featuring the works of Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), which is being offered as a part of a collaboration with the Mucha Foundation.

The NFT sale will coincide with the opening of the ‘Mucha to Manga – The Magic of the Line’ exhibition in Taipei.

Here’s a video in Chinese about the show displaying some of Mucha’s iconic art.

The store is said to offer complete control over the number of NFT editions and the format of the sale, with both fiat and crypto currencies accepted as payment.

HTC says a new NFT series will come to the store each month until April 2022, which will conclude with what it describes as “a special auction.”

For those of us in the VR space, all of this may seem a bit out of left field for the company, which over the years has built itself a significant niche in creating enterprise VR hardware. HTC is no stranger to jumping on the crypto bandwagon though. In 2019 the company released Exodus 1, a blockchain-focused smartphone that acts as a hardware wallet for storing cryptocurrency among other things.

How NFTs fit into all of that, well, there’s no telling how deep of a commitment the store actually represents. The company’s VIVE Arts initiative has been involved in bringing art-themed content to Viveport, but moreover it bringing VR to cultural institutions in limited-time exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London’s Royal Academy of Arts, Taipei’s National Palace Museum, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, Washington D.C.’s Newseum, and St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum since its founding in 2017.

Granted, NFT auctions are a far cry from bringing art to the masses—they primarily function as crypto-investment vehicles—although the earning potential for both the creators and buyers can’t be overstated.

The storied Christie’s auction house oversaw the sale of one NFT for $69 million back in March, something many NFT creators have hoped to replicate. Whether HTC makes those sort of headlines isn’t certain. At least Alphonse Mucha didn’t exclusively paint bored apes.

HTC Likely Announcing a New Standalone Vive Headset Next Week

From roadtovr

HTC recently said that it will host an online Vive event next week, but has only teased minimal hints about what it plans to announce. Regulatory filings spotted by Road to VR suggest a new standalone HTC Vive headset will be revealed.

It’s been less than five months since HTC launched its most recent VR headsets—the Vive Pro 2 and Vive Focus 3—but it looks like they’ve got another up their sleeve.

Just ahead of next week’s HTC Vive event, a new “HTC Vive headset” has appeared in regulatory filings submitted by the company to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The FCC is tasked with certifying products with electromagnetic emissions to be safe and compatible with regulations. Products utilizing radio, WiFi, infrared, etc. need certification before they can be distributed for sale. Certification by the FCC marks one step closer to the launch of consumer electronics product.

The new headset is identified by the model number 2Q7Y100, which doesn’t match any known Vive headsets thus released. Although the company has requested confidentiality of key filings which would clearly identify the headset, there’s some clues in the available information which point toward a standalone headset.

For one, the device’s FCC label—which all consumer electronics devices are required to have—is an ‘e-label’, which means instead of being printed on the device it’s accessible through the device’s software. Specifically, the user can access the FCC label by going to Settings → About → Regulatory Information. In fact, this is the same labeling approach that HTC’s Vive Focus 3 uses.

Further supporting the likelihood of this new Vive headset being standalone is documentation detailing Wi-Fi test reports which measure to ensure that the device’s Wi-Fi broadcasts are within the legal ranges. It appears the device uses a Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) radio. Most dedicated PC VR headsets use some form of Bluetooth for controller connectivity, but none of them use Wi-Fi.

HTC has kept its teasing for next week’s event pretty minimal thus far. The company has been using the phrase, “Go with the Flow,” (notable emphasis on “Flow” as a proper noun), in its promotions which have included photos with a cylindrical case of some sort. Ostensibly the headset will be small enough to fit inside the case, which would suggest a headset much more compact than most of what’s on the market today (if the scale of the photoshopped images can be trusted, anyway).

That certainly falls in line with the Vive Proton headsets that the company initially teased way back in early 2020; though they haven’t talked about them much since. If this new standalone is based on Proton, the headset seems likely to have been rebranded to Vive Flow, which the company trademarked in late August.

There’s also the possibility that Vive Flow won’t be a VR headset at all, but will actually be the company’s first AR headset based on Qualcomm’s ‘Smart Viewer’ reference design.

All will be revealed soon enough; HTC’s event will be held next week on October 14th.

HTC is Holding a Vive Product Event Just Ahead of Facebook Connect

From roadtovr

HTC is gearing up to hold what seems to be a new product unveiling on October 14th, or just ahead of Facebook Connect on the 28th of that month. The company says we’ll be hearing about some “big news in a small package.”

HTC announced the event on Twitter, saying it will take place on October 14th at 11 AM ET (local time here) in the company’s online event space, which is hosted by social VR platform Engage.

There’s still little indication what it might be, although we have some ideas. In February 2020, the company showed off a concept XR headset called Vive Proton, which was touted as a small form-factor device in the making, albeit in its early stages.

Image courtesy HTC

Presented in two flavors—a standalone model and a tethered model—it was suggested at the time that Vive Proton achieved its small form-factor via ‘pancake’-style optics, or the type we saw in the compact Pico VR Glasses prototype at CES 2020 right before in-person events were cancelled. Maybe a more refined version of the goggles fits into that thermos-looking thing as a protective charging case?

The company’s RSVP form for the event and tweet above also features a graphic with what appears to be the outside faceplate of Proton, although that may just be wishful thinking.

Image courtesy HTC

The graphic’s headline ‘Go with the Flow’ may hold a more concrete clue, as a new HTC trademark for a product called ‘VIVE FLOW’ was filed on August 26th, 2021, which refers to a “[h]ead mounted display for computer simulated reality, namely virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality.”

In any case, it’s a pretty safe bet that whatever HTC unveils it will be squarely targeted at prosumers and businesses, although we’re always happy to be wrong. There’s really only one way to find out though, and that’s to tune in on October 14th and see what HTC has in store.