HTC's financial hiccup delays Valve's VR plans this year

Aug 28, 2015 13:05 GMT  ·  By

Announced in March this year, Valve's VR headset developed in tandem with HTC has been delayed for the public for 2016, with only a very limited number of developers receiving the headset later this year.

Designed to go head-to-head with Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive has been chosen to represent Valve as the official headset of the company's virtual reality platform. The headset will be connected to the company's Steam VR base station which is basically a box that will run valve's VR software and will allow the user to be tracked within a 15-square-foot area, and not only being limited to head tracking like the conventional rival headsets.

HTC promises the new Vive headset will remove jitter and will achieve photorealistic imagery via two 1200 x 1080 displays that refresh at 90 frames per second. The displays will apparently cover a user's entire field of vision with 360-degree views, by offering them much bigger scale than what competitors, and especially Oculus Rift. The headset will come with a pair of HTC-made wireless controllers for manipulating objects or shooting weapons through hand tracking.

HTC Vive must survive the HTC crisis to finally be profitable to Valve

Although no official explanation on why this delay occurs has been given by Valve, it could be very much possible related to HTC's recent financial regression and its 15% of workforce layoffs in China. HTC did disclose the fact that it will begin a more serious reorientation towards its VR industry, wishing to invest more manpower and funds into its virtual reality department, firing 2,000 people from its total of 15,685 would clearly need some staff to be reorganized and some priorities set.

Apparently, Valve wants to use the technology brought by HTC in its Steam VR box and has already developers working with its Developer Edition SDK to employ it in games either owned by Valve or new indie games built especially for the Steam VR.