Revised HTC Vive images leak as company promises VR breakthrough
HTC says a second version will soon be shown with big tech enhancement
We were sad to hear about last week’s delay for HTC’s Vive virtual reality headset, but it sounds like the wait will be worth it: HTC is talking up a second version of the unit that promises some kind of big improvement over the last.
And you might be looking at it here. Some intrepid Reddit users actually found these images on HTC’s own developer portal for the Vive, so there’s little doubt that they’re real hardware images. Whether or not they’re the final consumer models is unclear, but they do look a lot more polished than the demo versions – dramatically so with the sleeker controllers (below), which look more like PlayStation Move wands now.
As for what’s changed, HTC just held a developer’s conference in Beijing, and CEO Cher Wang told the crowd that the Vive team recently made “a very, very big technological breakthrough,” and that it was significant enough for them to scrap the first version and wait a little longer to bring this new model to the masses.
"We shouldn’t make our users swap their systems later just so we could meet the December shipping date," she said, according to Engadget. And that’s one sentiment we can certainly agree with. Still, we don’t know what’s changed at this point.
We’ve already been hugely impressed by our time with even the earliest HTC Vive demo units, so the prospect of an even better model shipping in a few months is truly exciting indeed. HTC will showcase the new model at CES 2016 in early January in Las Vegas, and we’ll be on hand to bring you the latest on the revised Vive.
Andrew Hayward
Freelance Writer 
