With the commencement of both HTC Vive and Oculus VR announcing their respective new head-mounted displays (HMDs) that are said to come with onboard computational capabilities, it can be made out and rightly said that the next phase of virtual reality (VR) hardware will be standalone devices. HTC Vive that was the first out of the stalls to announce the tease of its partnership with Google earlier this year at Google I/O, 2017 Developer Conference, remained tight-lipped about the device since the day. Now it appears that finally, the wait will soon come to an end as, HTC will soon be showing off its standalone VR headset whose details are very bare right now, at the company’s annual Vive Developer Conference(VDC 2017) on the 14th of this month, in Beijing.

As reported by YiVian, an English Language publication, that covers the tech industry of China, the conference has recently published its promotional material that features a veiled image of the company’s upcoming headset hence confirming its launch. HTC also says it has some important announcements that are to be made. YiVian also found out that HTC has recently registered the name “Vive M” in China, all thanks to the trademark registration from HTC itself that could possibly mean ‘Vive Mobile’, a move that would position the new standalone as a little brother to the PC VR Vive headset somewhat.

Shown below is the recently published promotional material(poster) for the annual conference:

Even though it by no means is a final nail, the promotional flier says “A New Revolutionary Immersive Experience Is Here, Stay Focused On The Next Wave Of Innovations In VR.”

While the Chinese edition of the HTC Vive standalone HMD, for content distribution, will have access to Viveport , the western edition that will be a Daydream compatible device is thought to be known as the ‘HTC Vive Focus’ and is said to have Everything needed for the best portable VR built right into the headset and is, in fact, a complete PC and Smartphone-free system built around Google's Daydream. Beyond that, very little is currently known about the device but the cable-free approach is likely to be of quite a bit importance.

The HTC Vive standalone headset that will come with a six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) for head movement and will feature a single 3-DoF controller is to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 platform. And since the Daydream View HMD itself has only ever shipped with one controller, the inclusion of a single controller was obvious in order to accommodate the existing Google Daydream software. As seen in the company’s reference design for the 6DoF head movement tracking, the device will be using the inside-out positional tracking technology called Worldsense- that means now, enabling the users to move and look around freely with 6DoF, similar to the high-end VR systems, rather than simply letting users to only look around from a fixed point.

Despite a trickle of rumors that surround both the western and Chinese launches of the device –– HTC Vive still continues to refuse in the confirmation of any further details. It is only with the VDC 2017 event scheduled on 14th November 2017, that is almost a couple of weeks away, that all the information about the devices will become available. Till then let's just continue to hold on to the No Phone. No PC. Standalone VR.

Image Source: Dualshockers