HTC Vive VR
Working with Valve and SteamVR my HTC Advanced Concepts team developed and brought to market the first viable consumer VR to market with 2nd-gen room-scale play space and the first fully immersive controllers.
Valve had these now famous VR dev rooms for their deep research with QR codes pasted everywhere you look. The camera on your head looked at all those QR codes to drive back positioning data fast enough to re-fresh the low-latency displays to not make you famously VR nauseous. People would come out of these first demos and sometimes cry with emotion of the whole body immersive experience.
This pic of me having the Portal robots hovering and shooting at me while I duck and hide behind barriers- the most thrilling and interactive demo yet that made you desperately want for your own VR controller to shoot back. That was the next demo.
We kicked off the consumer hardware development with Valve and early VR developers in the fall to plan for announcing and demoing the Vive dev kits at GDC behind closed doors in the spring to spoil Oculus’s forthcoming launch.
Verge Review of the debut units
HTC Vive launched spring 2016 as the first complete room-scale VR system. We had laser scanning “Lighthouse” tracking cubes that you set in the corner of a room that delivered flawless full room-scale VR tracking including 6DOF hand controllers - 18 months before Oculus would have controllers.
CES Awards 2016 in anticipation of launch in April