It has been reported that HTC, the company behind some of the best Virtual & Augmented Reality headsets on the market, will be launching a new headset in January 2023.
The launch is slated to happen at CES, the Consumer Technology Association, in January 2023. This comes following a previous post earlier in the year teasing the release of a much smaller headset than consumers are accustomed to seeing.
This second tease, shared exclusively with The Verge, shows much more of the headset that the previous announcement and we can now clearly see that it seems like be an evolution of HTC’s Vive Flow. From the limited amount that we can see, the main differences seem to be external outward facing cameras that will presumably be used for passthrough and possibly mixed and augmented reality.
This most likely isn’t the only evolution that HTC has implemented into this new device. It seems as though they are reluctant to share anything other than obscured teaser images of the product and not discuss any definitive features until the product’s official announcement.
The upcoming device’s predecessor, the HTC Vive Flow, was labelled a great idea with flawed execution by TechAdvisor. The device only worked with a select few Android based mobile devices which effectively cut itself off from a large portion of the market that didn’t use these devices.
It’ll be interesting to see if HTC have taken the feedback that some users have given them into consideration with this new device. After all, despite the Flow’s faults, it was still one of the most innovative Virtual Reality devices released over the past few years.
The Flow is one of the lightest, most compact VR offerings ever released and if the upcoming device features even half as much innovation, it will be a product that truly takes the next step towards the future of VR.