vive schematics lcd panel factory

Bottoms up! We flip the Vive and go eye-to-eye with the front-facing camera. This unblinking cyclops also provides AR for the Vive. What"s it running on? Let"s get inside and find out.

Nestled in a nook between the eyepieces is a proximity sensor that detects when the Vive is actually on your face—presumably to shut off the displays, conserving power and processor resources.

The Rift CV1 doesn"t have this feature, probably because its asymmetric lenses allow you to adjust focus by simply pushing the headset higher or lower on your face. Is this confirmation of a different approach to optics in the Vive? Only more teardown will tell.

This method is the exact opposite of the head-tracking technique found in the Oculus Rift. In the Rift, the desk-mounted camera tracked the IR emitters in the headset, whereas in the Vive, the headset sees light from the mounted IR emitters without actually "tracking" its location.

After adios-ing four Phillips screws and doing a little investigative prying, we lift away the display cover for access to one of the twin Samsung-branded AMOLED panels.

Each display measures ~91.8 mm diagonally, which translates to ~447 ppi. For comparison, the Rift CV1 has ~456 ppi due to a slightly smaller display (90 mm) that still packs the same resolution as the Vive.

Unlike the hybrid lenses we encountered in the Oculus Rift, the Vive"s lenses appear to have a uniform contour. It seems that HTC opted to control focus through adjustment of the eye relief.

The Vive is manufactured by HTC, but it"s quite evident that Valve had plenty of input on the design process. The controller touchpad is veryreminiscent of the ones we found on the Steam Controller.

Firing up our IR camera, we get a glimpse of the internals through the IR-transparent front panel—an array of bright IR LEDs, and a pair of motorized lasers make the Lighthouse shine bright.

While the Rift works with an IR camera and some fancy machine vision software to follow the Constellation IR LED array, the Vive uses an entirely different system for position tracking.

Though a completely wire-free experience is not yet available, HTC managed to fit all the power and data lines for the Vive into a single cable that routes neatly up and over your left ear—a big improvement from the heavy multi-cable ponytail that dangled from the original.

Where the original Vive kept nearly all its onboard silicon clustered onto a single board, the sequel uses two smaller boards. This daughterboard services the displays, I/O, and one or two other things we"ll show you in just a moment.

The HTC Vive is an impressive piece of kit, but it"s far from simple. A diagram reportedly included in an email to early adopters this week made that fact very clear by detailing the no fewer than twenty separate items included with the consumer edition. Much of this is the same as the development kits we"ve already tested (in fact, early models had even more wires), but it"s still something else to see a consumer product other than a Lego set shipping with so many pieces.

Much of the complexity is due to the kind of virtual reality experience offered by the Vive. Unlike the PlayStation VR or Oculus Rift, it offers a room-scale virtual reality setup, thanks to the laser tracking system powered by its lighthouse boxes. Those boxes need to be set up and plugged into the wall, and a large tether connects the headset your PC. The Vive also has two custom controllers. All of that means lots of power cables, USB cables, mounts, and more.

Winning in this market is now HTC’s all-or-nothing strategy. The HTC Vive VR Head-Mounted Display (HMD) is aimed at saving HTC from collapse. Vive VR can be used in different sectors, including gaming, entertainment, health, automotive, retail and education. It promises a premium VR experience.

After its tracking was up and running, there was another big problem to overcome: The images on the HMD still appeared blurry. As Valve experimented, the company realized that for gaming, a low-persistence display was a must. In this case, that meant lighting up a panel for one millisecond and then turning it off for nine milliseconds, in order to prevent ghosting. To prove its theory, it first created a "telescope" that let you look into another three-dimensional space; next it designed a custom board to output high-frame-rate, low-persistent images to off-the-shelf AMOLED displays.

These panels then went into a "big ugly headset" (Valve"s Chet Faliszek"s words, not mine), and testing continued. "We were looking for what we had hoped was out there, but didn"t know if it existed," Faliszek said. The team at Valve fell in love with "room-scale" VR and the freedom of movement it brings. "We just worried about the commercial aspect, and the quality aspect. No one was going to wallpaper their room like that, and we didn"t have an input solution that matched." Something else was required.

The advanced concepts team was a small group that birthed both the periscope-like Re Camera and Re Grip wearable, but by far its biggest venture has been the Vive. Originally it was to be the Re Vive -- an apt title for a bold new product from a troubled smartphone company -- but the "Re" slowly drifted away from the company"s marketing message. Peter Chou took over the team after stepping down as CEO and renamed it the HTC Future Development Lab.

It"s clear that at some point Oculus and Valve"s cooperative spirit fell apart. It could be that Oculus and Valve disagreed on what VR should be: The Rift and Vive certainly offer different experiences. But it"s also been suggested that communication from Oculus ground to a halt in the months after the Facebook acquisition, which forced Valve to explore other paths. It"s unlikely that anyone will go on the record to confirm that for years. All we know is that in early January, Luckey was reportedly calling Valve"s tech "the best virtual reality demo in the world," and by late spring, HTC and Valve were meeting to hammer out a deal.

"This is the one time in our lives when we can make a clean start," explained Faliszek. "We said, "You know what, we"re not going to have X, A, B, Y. We"re going to say no. We"re going to make something specifically for the thing we"re making it for."" What Valve and HTC landed on was a mashup of two existing products. The Vive controllers have the same basic form of Sony"s PlayStation Move, introduced in 2010, but add the precise input of the trackpad from Valve"s Steam controller as well as laser-tracking sensors.

Less than six months after HTC and Valve started working together, they were ready to share their vision with others. On Oct. 20th, 2014, a select group of developers were invited to Valve"s Bellevue, Washington, offices to try out Vive. "We made them sign NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] just to look at the actual NDA," Faliszek laughed. "It confused everybody, but they came." Who wouldn"t?

As a smartphone manufacturer, HTC knows more than a few things about products breaking cover early. But the Vive didn"t. "Over 20 companies were involved, and no one leaked," O"Brien explained. Why? Faliszek attributes it to camaraderie among developers. There were only so many people with the kits, and Valve arranged a private forum where everybody could share their work and help one another out.

With developers on board, the aggressive pace of the Vive project continued. HTC and Valve decided on MWC 2015 for its grand reveal. A second showcase two weeks later at GDC 2015 focused on games. By every account, the launch was a complete success. Even journalists who had tried dozens of VR experiences before Vive were impressed by the room-scale demos and the accurate head and controller tracking. The plan was then set in stone. Exactly one year in, preorders were to go live, with the final consumer edition to be unveiled at MWC and game demos at GDC. Now they had to make the thing.

Aside from comfort, two additional features have made their way to the headset over the past year: a front-facing camera and a microphone. The front-facing camera is part of Chaperone, a system announced in January that"s meant to keep you safe and in touch with the real world. With the press of a button, the Vive can display real-world images on top of the virtual world you"re inside. This was always part of the plan -- we were told as much back in January -- and O"Brien said the original developer kit nearly had a pair of cameras on the front (you can see the place where they were supposed to be added in our first hands-on), but "it didn"t work, so we just introduced it at a later point when it did."

Faliszek, O"Brien and Zellweger all claim that developing the Vive was trouble-free. Given the tight time scale here -- less than two years since Valve and HTC first started working together -- it"s clear it"s been a pretty smooth ride. Headsets, controllers and base stations are flying off the factory line. All that"s left now is to sell them.

Assuming the Vive is a success (HTC doesn"t break out sales numbers, but it"s sold through its entire stock for April), how long until customers need to replace their headset with the "Vive 2"? A console might last eight years, a top-of-the-range gaming PC might stay relevant for five years, a smartphone just two. Neither HTC nor Valve want to divulge their future plans. But they do believe the Vive has legs.

The companies could have made a better VR headset -- there"s no doubting that. The resolution on its two 1,200 x 1,080 panels (one for each eye) could have been increased, for one. But the bottleneck isn"t the headset; it"s the PC that"s powering it. The GPU requirements are already high, calling for an AMD Radeon R9 290 or an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. These are cards that, even years after their release, still cost about the same as a PlayStation or Xbox. "The idea was to pick something that"s super high-end so in a year there"ll be enough people that have the graphics cards to run this," explained Faliszek.

A Vive 2 -- or whatever the sequel will be called -- has to happen. "At some point you"re going to want to increase resolution," Faliszek admitted. "We"ll definitely learn more. We"ll find out what"s interesting. But you can"t [release a new headset] lightly." Once PC graphics cards are capable of pushing the required 90 frames per second to a higher-resolution panel, it"s likely we"ll see a new Vive. But that doesn"t mean that early adopters will be left behind.

The Tokyo-based LCD specialist expects its favored display technology to become the standard for VR because it can achieve higher resolution than OLED while keeping costs reasonable. That advantage is imperceptible in mobile devices but becomes critical in the more demanding VR scenario.

On paper, the HTC Vive Focus 3 is easily the best VR headset in the standalone form factor (no connection to a system required) that has ever been released. It is precisely what we"d expect from a high-end VR system for gamers with deep pockets and a desire for the best of the best.

The Vive Focus 3 is HTC"s third standalone VR headset, but it is the first one to get an official Western release. Sadly, HTC targets businesses with the Focus 3, which is not meant for a consumer audience, which is a shame because it is a capable device that gamers would appreciate, if not for the hefty $1,300 price tag.

The Focus 3 features the same 2448 x 2448 per eye RGB displays as found in the Vive Pro 2, although the standalone device"s refresh rate is limited to 9 0Hz. The headset also features HTC"s newly developed dual-element lenses, which give you a wide, 120-degrees field of view. On the bottom, there"s an analog IPD adjustment dial, which provides you with a range of 57 to 72mm.

The front of the headset features a glossy section with the Vive logo. The rest of the visor is constructed of lightweight magnesium alloy. The material helps keep the weight to a minimum while also facilitating cooling for the internal components. In addition, HTC installed a heatsink inside the visor, which you can see through vent holes on the top and bottom of the headset, which is actively cooled by a small fan. When the headset is running, you can hear the fan spinning.

The next step is to connect the controllers. The process is simple and involves pressing the Vive logo button on the right controller and the hamburger button on the left controller. The pairing process took less than a second.

The Vive Focus 3 home looks like a modern office space that overlooks a desert scene. The environment is fancy, but the menu system is relatively basic. We could log in to our Viveport account; However, it did not give us access to the Viveport marketplace. You can access the content library, which provides you with a tiled listing of the installed software. You also get a settings menu to adjust some of the configuration options for the headset.

The Vive Focus 3 is a Snapdragon XR2-based headset, the same processing hardware found in Facebook"s Oculus Quest 2. Therefore, games built for Quest should theoretically be compatible with Focus 3 with minor changes from the developer. Furthermore, Qualcomm developed a wireless streaming feature for the XR2 platform, so Focus 3 should be capable of streaming PC VR games wirelessly to the headset.

At present, neither of those two options is possible. However, we did locate an option in the system settings that suggests a future software update could enable SteamVR streaming in the future. If that happens, the Vive Focus 3 could develop a niche following of enthusiast gamers. However, most of these headsets will be used for business training, remote collaboration, product design or in location-based entertainment facilities.

One of the most prominent things that stood out about the Focus 3 is how fast it is. From a cold boot, the headset takes just a few seconds to get you right to the home environment. The screens turn on immediately and the Vive logo spins in front of you while it boots, giving you something visually interesting to look at while you wait. At no point did it feel like we were waiting around too for something to happen.

As mentioned, we tried out the apps pre-loaded for reviews on the Vive Focus 3 to get an idea of the experiences business users can expect. HTC told us that the Vive Focus 3 would be compatible with SteamVR content with use of something called the Vive Business Steaming cable. The company didn"t provide additional details about the cable, but we imagine it would be similar to Facebook"s optical USB Link cable for the Quest 2. A wireless streaming app is also in development, and HTC said it would be available soon.

Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass is a VR tour of part of the Louvre in France. The courtyard is fully rendered in near-photorealistic detail, and you can explore all around it via teleport. You can move right up to the paintings hanging in the Grand Gallery, and with the clarity of the Vive Focus 3’s screens, you can see enough detail to appreciate these masterpieces. For each painting, there is an accompanying narrative clip explaining the significance.

HTC put together an excellent package with the Vive Focus 3. Businesses that adopt this platform will undoubtedly love the features and the performance. It"s a shame that gamers won"t see the benefits of a healthy competitor in the standalone consumer VR space just yet.

Editor"s Note June 28, 2021:This review was originally published on June 24, 2021 and was updated on June 28, 2021 to include information on the Micro SD card slot.HTC Vive Focus 3: Price Comparison

This is the main selling point of the HTC VIVE Cosmos. HTC recognises that even its bottom-tier consumer enterprise products are a luxury only a few enthusiasts can afford. So the idea is to make the new base model “future proof” by allowing for iterative upgrades to the headset.

The biggest issue is that, while a customisable headset is very promising, the HTC VIVE Cosmos hasn’t launched with a whole lot to show for it. An External Tracking Mod is coming soon that will let you combine the headset’s inside-out six-camera tracking with traditional lighthouse tracking (those little black tracking boxes) for more accurate tracking overall but that’s not released yet. There’s also support for last year’s VIVE Wireless Adapter mod that’ll let you go wireless but it will set you back an additional $479. Which exemplifies our biggest issue with the VIVE Cosmos: these expensive mods will ultimately increase the price of your HTC VIVE Cosmos, which is already a few hundred dollars more than the standard Consumer Edition (which is still selling at Harvey Norman for $939).

With just a few mods, you could probably cover the cost of a Consumer Edition VIVE and then some. Again, these are optional upgrades and time will tell if they’re worth it or not but I can’t help feeling that, at the very least, HTC could have included the Wireless Adapter with the Cosmos to sweeten the deal a little bit.

Valve has developed custom lenses that work with both LCD and OLED display technologies and is making these lenses available to purchase for use in SteamVR compatible HMDs. These lenses and Valve’s unique calibration and correction software are designed specifically to be paired with several off-the-shelf VR displays to enable the highest quality VR visual experiences. These optical solutions currently support a field of view between 85 and 120 degrees (depending on the display). The lenses, which are designed to support the next generation of room-scale virtual reality, optimize the user’s perceived tracking experience and image sharpness while reducing stray light.

The functional Elf headset prototype was the same impressively small form-factor as I saw previously, featuring a pair of Kopin’s 1-inch ‘Lightning’ displays each with a 2,048 x 2,048 resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. The headset isn’t just significantly more compact than others—at just 220 grams it’s less than half the weight of the Rift and Vive (though at this point it’s lacking integrated audio, IPD adjustment, or positional tracking tech, which would require additional hardware and weight).

The second thing I noticed was the field of view which felt much closer to Google’s Daydream headsets than what you’d be used to with the Rift, Vive, or PSVR. Kopin said the prototype I was looking through was a 70 degree field of view, and that they’re working on developing different lenses to offer 80 and 100 degree fields of view (and I got to look through early versions of those lenses; more on that later). On the 70 degree prototype, the ‘binocular’ feeling (of having very noticeable dark circles around your field of view) was quite apparent. Despite the incredibly smooth and sharp image I was seeing, the low field of view is an immersion killer so it’s a good thing that Kopin is also developing lenses with a wider view.

With more than three times the pixels than the Rift and Vive (2,048 x 2,048 vs. 1,080 x 1,200), it looked stunningly sharp (pixel density in this case is getting an extra boost from the lower field of view too). Individual pixels are all but invisible, and I couldn’t make out any screen door effect. Since the 70 degree FoV lens isn’t Fresnel, I didn’t see any god ray artifacts (which are prevalent on the Rift and Vive), nor did I spot any chromatic aberration. I didn’t see any obvious mura issues which is good, but would want more time in the headset to be sure that there is none. Also, because this is a micro OLED display, the blacks were very deep. However, I didn’t get a chance to see the right scene to assess whether or not there was any black-smearing present.

Today at CES 2018, HTC revealed the Vive Pro. It isn’t the ‘Vive 2’—and the original Vive will continue to be sold alongside it—but, in many ways, it raises the bar for PC VR headsets.

First and foremost is the headset’s improved display, which offers 78% more pixels with a 2,880 × 1,600 resolution (1,440 × 1,600 per display). This makes a big difference in clarity of the VR world. With the original Vive’s 2,160 × 1,200 resolution it’s relatively easy to see sub-pixels (the little red, green, and blue dots that mix together to make white, and every other color you see). Looking through the lenses of the Vive Pro, not only have the sub-pixels disappeared, it’s challenging to even make out whole pixels.

If you hear people saying that the Vive Pro still has quite visible screen door effect (SDE), I would bet that they are actually talking about aliasing and mura.

Aliasing is what happens when you don’t have sufficient pixel density to convince your eyes that a perfectly straight line is perfectly straight, when it’s actually made up of the jagged edges of pixels—this effect is exaggerated at a distance since fewer pixels are available to render more distant objects. Anti-aliasing techniques can go a long way to hide aliasing, so how much you notice the aliasing vary depending upon the application, but it’s still there in the Vive Pro.

The good news is that the mura-correction on the Vive Pro appears at least as good as that of the original Vive (which is pretty good). However, it’s still there, and, perhaps, now an equal or slightly larger contributor to the clarity bottleneck than SDE.

The result of greater pixel density—which brings less aliasing and less noticeable individual pixels—and solid mura-correction makes a big difference in the clarity of the virtual scene when looking through the Vive Pro. With every step forward like this, we’re getting closer to feeling like your head is really in another place (that fleeting feeling of Presence).

When I put my head in the Vive Pro for the first time, standing in the finely rendered Driftwood environment, I couldn’t help but marvel at a new level of closeness to the virtual world; our heads are so close to pushing through the window screen and out into the virtual world.

But the increase in resolution isn’t the only thing that makes the Vive Pro feel like a substantial improvement over the original Vive. The headset is also more comfortable, easier to use, and supports even better tracking.

Let’s start with comfort. The new strap on the Vive Pro feels like an improved version of the Deluxe Audio Strap (an optional accessory for the original Vive). Yes, it’s undeniably bulky, but some subtle changes make it more comfortable, and the Vive Pro comes standard with this new strap.

The new head mount on the Vive Pro functions roughly the same as the old one—with a knob on the back to tighten the headset to taste—but a change to the design of the padding structure on the back of the head feels, at least in my 20 minutes or so of testing it side-by-side with the DAS, to increase comfort by more gently cupping the area just under the crown of the head, rather than gripping tightly against the crown like a vice (as the DAS seems to do). It also feels easier to find the comfort sweet spot compared to the DAS.

The struts that connect the display housing to the back of the strap are also further away from your temples and help make the headset feel more ‘open’ on the sides rather than totally encompassing your head. Along with what feels like better balance, the Vive Pro feels less obtrusive on your head.

The new headphones also feel less likely to accidentally flip from the extended position into the on-ear position while you’re in the middle of putting on the headset (and irksome annoyance). Note: if you were following our HTC CES 2018 Press Event liveblog earlier, we reported that the Vive Pro has removable headphones—we’ve since confirmed that they’re actually permanently attached. [Update: After varying reports from HTC, the final word is that the headphones are detachable.]

Take your VR experience to the next level with the 3rd generation Vive Tracker to track full-body movements or easily integrate custom objects, devices. Bringing reality to virtual reality is the mission of the Vive Tracker 3.0.

The New VIVE Tracker 3.0 has many improvements over its previous version. It is 15% lighter, 33% smaller and offers a 75% longer battery life. You can work, train and create longer with greater ease and precision.

For gamers looking for more immersion, use the Vive Tracker 3.0 supported by many virtual reality games (Example on VivePort: VRChat, After The Fall, Audica, Warcade...)

VIVE Tracker is a device that offers vast possibilities for accurate motion detection or the position of a real world object/animal. For film production, you can create character animations easily or work with virtual sets. Sports simulation can also boost the performance of your athletes.