Making their rounds around forums and tech sites are a pair of images that purportedly show the more refined HTC Vive VR headset. The images were allegedly posted on HTC's website but quickly pulled, though not quick enough from being reposted on Reddit, Thursday night.
Nope, a price tag wasn't on or around either of the products in the two images. But this new version of Vive is more streamlined, especially the controllers.
The headset still looks a lot like the first one HTC and Valve revealed, but it appears to be slightly more compact. It's still speckled with sensors, but now there's one camera on the center of its face instead of two.
The controllers look a lot less like joysticks from an early flight simulator and slightly more to what Facebook's Oculus VR is preparing to pair with its own virtual reality headset. HTC and Valve have smoothed over the form factor of the controller in general and have moved from hexagonal sensor heads to circular mounts.
In less than a month, the world will know if this is an incredibly convincing hoax or if this is indeed what's coming to consumers soon. Valve and HTC plan to show off the latest version of the Vive at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in early January.
The Vive was originally supposed to launch this month, but HTC and Valve decided to push its release back to April 2016. That's because the Taiwanese manufacturer and the American video game developer recently made "a very, very big technological breakthrough" with the Vive platform, according to HTC's CEO, Cher Wang.
"We shouldn't make our users swap their systems later just so we could meet the December shipping date," said Wang.
Wang wouldn't hint to what this technological step forward was, and if the pair of leaked images was in fact real, they aren't readily giving up clues as to what this breakthrough might be either. Though the move from two cameras to one might have something to do with that.
