HTC & Valve Announce Virtual Reality Partnership

March 2, 2015

With the 2015 Game Developers Conference upon us, mobile phone giant HTC has announced their foray into the burgeoning virtual reality market, partnering up with Valve to produce a VR headset. The product, known as HTC Vive, will be released to developers in a few months time, with a consumer version to be released by the end of the year.

The Vive offers to deliver a high quality virtual reality experience, immersing users with a 1200 by 1080 pixel screen with 90 FPS video. Where it differs from other experiences is that Valve & HTC are aiming to create an even more immersive solution with what’s being dubbed Full Room Scale 360 Degree Solution with Tracked Controllers. This allows you to effectively walk around your environment and inspect objects from every possible angle, in the 15×15 feet area Steam VR provides. HTC are also planning to introduce new game controllers to work with the Vive, which are being designed to be simple to use.

“It’s rare that a company has an opportunity to forever transform the ways in which people interact with the world and communicate with each other but that is exactly what we plan to do with Valve”, says Cher Wang, CEO of HTC. ”We achieved this once before with our development of smartphone technology” Peter Chou, CEO of HTC added, “And, through our partnership with Valve, we’ll now be doing this for a second time with VR technology of which consumers could only previously dream.” On the Valve side, Ken Birdwell adds “Our collaboration with HTC is driven by the companies’ shared desire to produce the most compelling and complete VR experience. Delivering content creators with the Vive Developer Edition is an incredibly important milestone in our efforts to achieve that goal”.

Valve are planning to show off the new hardware to developers this week in San Francisco, as the Game Developers Conference begins. They also plan to use the rest of the week to show off more of their physical hardware projects, including the final version of the Steam Controller, and latest iterations of Steam Machines.

Source: HTC