February 21, 2019 – Vive has today announced its newest virtual reality standalone hardware for enterprise customers, the VIVE Focus Plus. The company has upgraded the existing six degrees of freedom (6DoF) Focus headset to incorporate dual 6DoF controllers, giving users the ability to interact with their virtual environment with the same freedom as PC VR devices. Vive also stated that this enhancement will make porting existing PC VR content easier for developers while making it physically more portable and natural to use.
“At Vive, the announcement of Vive Focus Plus furthers our commitment to rapidly iterate and refine the VR market for both businesses and consumers,” said Daniel O’Brien, General Manager Americas, HTC Vive. “This rollout of Vive Focus Plus leads the way for deeper immersion, more realistic training and simulation, and easier porting of experiences from PC to the stand-alone category.”
The Vive Focus Plus, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 Mobile VR Platform, has had improvements made with regards to wearer comfort, which Vive has said “lays the groundwork for extended sessions in VR needed by commercial customers.” The headset also ships with full enterprise support that includes professional features such as Kiosk Mode, Gaze Support, and device management tools to remotely enroll, monitor, and manage multiple headsets all at once. In most markets, the product will include an enterprise license for use at no additional cost.
Powered by the VIVE WAVE Platform with content from VIVEPORT, subscribers will also have access to a growing library of titles on the newly announced Viveport Infinity offering – Vive’s unlimited subscription service for VR. For a monthly subscription fee, members can explore a range of games, apps, and experiences. In addition to Vive Focus Plus, Viveport Infinity is compatible with high-end PC-based VR systems as well as the full spectrum of WAVE supported headsets. Members will be able to use a single account across their portfolio of VR devices when the service launches on April 2nd.
Vive Focus Plus offers two ultrasonic 6DoF controllers featuring an analog trigger that gives users the ability to control objects or interactions with pressure-sensitive input. Additionally, with the aid of the WAVE platform and SDK tools, porting from PC-based VR to Vive Focus Plus will be possible for developers.
Companies are already implementing Vive Focus Plus for training and simulation purposes. Olivier Pierre, COO and Founder of Immersive Factory commented: “In our dedication to occupational health and safety, we easily ported our entire Hazard Spotting range from the Vive Pro to Vive Focus Plus to facilitate our large corporation deployments.” He added, “Vive Focus Plus will perfectly immerse our clients in realistic environments enabling full movement, which supports memorization of process and procedures, and improves behavior by creating consequences to their actions. Having a professional standalone headset is very important for us to widely integrate and deploy virtual reality for workforce training at large groups, with plants all other the world, who previously saw the equipment as a barrier.”
Olivier Gardinetti, CTO, SimforHealth said: “With HTC’s Vive Focus Plus providing a high-end processor and 3K AMOLED display, we are able to create realistic and immersive 3D environments for our medical and nursing simulators, providing better training outcomes for HCPs without wires or connected computers. Moreover, the 6DOF controllers have improved the way to perform specific medical interactions that were not possible with the regular 3DOF controllers. Now, Simforhealth’s simulators have a better, more comfortable user experience.”
The Vive Focus Plus headset will be available for purchase starting in Q2 2019 from www.vive.com in 25 markets worldwide, supporting 19 languages.
Vive will be showcasing the Vive Focus Plus along with the Vive Pro Eye, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, next week. The company will be spotlighting partner experiences that include construction safety and hazard training, medical simulation for nurses and their own multi-user collaboration tool, Vive Sync, in addition to demos on the future of VR and 5G.
Image credit: Vive
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.