2023 is an exciting year for the virtual and augmented reality headset market: HTC’s new Vive XR Elite headset is set to compete against Meta’s Quest headsets and the rumored Apple AR / VR device.
Set at a price of $2099, the model is open for preorders now.
It is a lightweight model with a weight of 625 grams, although it is slightly heavier than the Meta Quest 2.
The portable high-performance headset supports the gamut of consumer games and software HTC has offered on past VR headsets along with mixed reality experiences using full-colour passthrough video.
It offers a screen resolution of around 2K pixels per eye, a 110-degree diagonal field of view, a 90Hz refresh rate, 12GB of memory, 128GB of storage, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2, the same chip that’s in the 2021 Meta Quest 2. It features four wide-angle cameras that let it track the user’s hands or a pair of motion controllers using the design from HTC’s earlier Vive Focus.
“We’re going to have a lot of consumer content, gaming, fitness, entertainment, but it will also do things like productivity,” says Vive general manager Dan O’Brien.
An unsual feature of the XR Elite is a lens diopter adjustment option that is supposed to let you use the device without them in addition to an adjustor for the distance between lenses.
The headset’s weight includes a back-mounted battery that HTC promises will last around two hours. For longer periods of use, it’s hot-swappable — a small backup battery built into the main headset to keep it running for around 10 minutes while you replace the spent main battery with a fresh one.
The XR Elite supports an additional “glasses mode” that’s supposed to make the headset far lighter. Glasses mode lets you snap off the strap and battery and replace them with a pair of plastic pieces that rest over your ears and — according to HTC — reduce the weight to 240 grams.
The headset comes in a package of 2 motion controllers, a battery, a Type-C to Type-C cable, and 2 Type-A to Type-C cables.
We’ll see how it stacks up against Apple’s headset that is tipped to launch sometime later this year.
