This week has certainly been focused on Oculus and its two headsets Quest and Rift S (especially the latter), but earlier in the year HTC Vive dominated announcing the Vive Cosmos and Vive Pro Eye. While the Vive Pro Eye has now gone on sale HTC Vive hasn’t released any further info on the other headset, initially seen as a rival to Oculus Quest. Now details have emerged that reveal a launch window of Q3 2019 for HTC Vive Cosmos.
Antony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo, a virtual reality (VR) developer and blogger recently visited HTC’s headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan, and got to meet some of HTC Vive engineers and project managers. He naturally broached the subject of Vive Cosmos due to the complete lack of information from the company since the initial announcement.
To all intents and purposes, Vitillo met with a wall of silence when trying to glean even the slightest bit of information regarding the device – especially when it came to specs – with staff saying “Sorry, but I can’t tell you this.” But it wasn’t a complete dead end. A spokesperson did say HTC Vive Cosmos should arrive around Q3 2019, but it’s not clear if that’s for developer kits or a consumer version. Dev kits were initially rumoured to be going out earlier this year but that doesn’t seem to have happened with HTC saying: “they are a bit on a different schedule than the one announced at CES” due to improving the headset.
Another bit of interesting information was connection options. HTC Vive Cosmos isn’t an all-in-one device, while the first announcement did tease some sort of smartphone connection capability, HTC did stress that Vive Cosmos is a PC-tethered device with inside-out tracking – so more like Oculus Rift S. The Vive Cosmos will connect to PC’s via DisplayPort but when Vitillo asked about the new VirtualLink protocol that also got a positive response. Of course, no further details were given regarding how both options would work.
And just to round things off, even though Vive Cosmos is a cabled headset it will also get a wireless adapter, whether it’s the same as the current Vive Wireless Adapter wasn’t revealed.
When HTC does decide to unveil further information regarding Vive Cosmos VRFocus will let you know.
