We’re not going for hardcore gamers, but a broader audience, people who are curious about it today. If you want to take it with you there’s a model for that as well. You don’t need to set up external base stations. We think that having something that can bridge those two worlds-we think that’s a segment and it’s going to be important. Steiber: We want to be the leader in the premium VR segment when it comes to the PC, as well as stand-alone. GamesBeat: Where does this fit in the spectrum, then, of what you’ll have out there? Steiber: We’ll give you more information soon. GamesBeat: So it would be tethered with a wire down to your pocket, something like that.
It needs either a PC or a mobile device, a computing unit. GamesBeat: Can you use it standalone, without connecting to something? There will be all kinds of extensions coming to this thing. However, what we announced yesterday is that when you want to bring this thing with you, you’ll be able to connect it to other computing devices. GamesBeat: What else are you saying about it for certain? It’s not wired? In the next couple of months we’ll have more details around launch and pricing and tech specs and so on. GamesBeat: You don’t have a date for the Cosmos yet, right? Those are the people we want to bring on board. We’re targeting people who are interested in VR, but who maybe think it’s too much hassle right now.
The idea is that we want to get the hardware, the content, and the software platform working in a way that’s much more integrated together. If someone’s pinging you and you want to have a social interaction, it’s very easy to transport yourself between these different worlds. Or maybe you have a meeting, so you can check out the meeting app we have here. You press the button and this portal opens up, which allows you to move very easily from Population One to, say, your Mozilla browser and check something out. When you’re in Population One, you can open something called the Lens. From that, you have easy access to your store, your content, your video player, your browser, and your social experiences. You land in our home space, where you have all of your stuff. Then you have the Vive Reality system, which is a new interaction platform. When you’re in VR, you don’t have to think about buying anything. You can access hundreds of titles as much as you want for a low monthly fee. The way you’ll get into the hardware, we’ll have Viveport Infinity that we announced, which is essentially Netflix for VR. It’s easy to get into, and you can flip it up, so it’s optimized for a broader audience. It’s inside-out tracking with no base stations. One thing is that we want to make sure it becomes much more user-friendly, both when it comes to the hardware and the setup. I think the main thing is that we want to make sure VR becomes much more accessible to everyone. There’s a fairly easy process for developers. A lot of the demos here were done in just a couple of weeks, the upgrade. They’ll change from pointing and clicking to looking and doing something. I think we’ll see a lot of developers upgrade. The developer needs to make sure they leverage the technology. GamesBeat: Does almost everything have foveated rendering here? Eventually you’re just going to interact with everything in a more natural fashion. In the beginning you look at things because you know you have to look at them. Those are the main things we’re trying to showcase. You get very high clarity where you’re watching, but you can save on the data where you’re not watching. The third is foveated rendering, especially when we move to more streaming. As we have more and more avatar interactions, having actual eye contact is a great thing. Instead of pointing and clicking, you just naturally look. There are three things that are important here. A lot of customers we talk to, especially in the enterprise space, want to use this for training applications.
We want to bring that together with a great software experience around Vive Reality.Įye tracking is a natural evolution. Rikard Steiber: At this CES, the main thing is to extend our leadership, not just around hardware, but also around content.