Taiwanese tech company HTC launched its new mixed reality headset, the Vive XR Elite, at CES 2023, describing it as a “gateway” to the metaverse.
The Vive XR Elite will serve as the “perfect physical gateway to the world of experiences offered by the Viverse, our version of the metaverse”, Dear Wangco-founder and president of HTC, at A statement accompanying the launch.
At $1,099, the device doubles as a virtual reality headset with a wide 110° field of view. 4k resolution and 90Hz refresh rate, plus directional audio, four wide field-of-view cameras and a depth sensor for 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) spatial resolution.
Like Meta’s rival Quest Pro headset, the Vive XR Elite can also be used as a mixed reality headset and includes a color RGB passthrough camera and hand tracking.
The headset comes with two controllers with hand tracking and capacitive sensing, and is compatible with the HTC wrist tracker.
The device’s battery provides two hours of full use of the XR and can be removed to convert the device to a glasses form factor when connected to an external power source. The Vive XR Elite also incorporates a novelty: adjustable lenses for spectacle wearers.
The ambitions of the HTC metaverse
HTC does not hide its meta ambitions. The company collaborates with the layer 1 blockchain Lamina1, which was founded by him Neil Stephenson, author of “Snow Crash” and co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation Peter Vessenes.
In a statement, HTC said it will use Lamina1 tools to “enable more efficient cross-platform asset distribution and management across the world,” meaning users can migrate digital assets such as avatars, clothing and artwork between metaverse platforms.
The tech company also announced a number of metaverse collaborations at CES 2023, including a team up with fashion magazine ELLE Taiwan, which will open a showroom in the metaverse metaverse. Warner Music Taiwan will launch a “new world of music experience” on Viverse, while Japanese creator platform pixiv will work with HTC to bring VRoid cartoon-style avatars to Viverse, using the VRM open standard.
HTC has made no secret of its metaverse ambitions; In June 2022, I launched HTC Desire 22 Prole Smartphone describing as a metaverse phone and promoting its built-in feature NFT Portfolio and diversified integration.
Since 2018, it has been producing Exodus 1 and Displacement 1s Smartphones, with built-in crypto wallets and the ability to run a full Bitcoin node.
At that time, the “decentralized enterprise leader” Phil Chen, Dire Decode that “in five years it will be trivial to have a Bitcoin node or other blockchain nodes stored on your phone”.
