Viveport? Yes! More VR Peripherals? Please

Posted on 08 Aug 2016 by
Jordan Fong

Greetings again, welcome back to another segment I like to call “VR News, Is There Any? There Is? Let’s Write About It.” It’s been a little while since there’s been any big news when it comes to the Vive, but of course that’s why I’m here, isn’t it. A few days ago at an expo referred to VRLA, the Vive team took to the stage and announced their new project, Viveport. With the launch coming in fall, and a developer’s beta on the way, Viveport will act as hub away from Steam, serving up VR applications from many categories. Viveport itself will be a customisable environment you can walk and teleport around, a cross between a museum and a home.

 “Our mission i the unleash human imagination from the limitations of reality, and Viveport will be an important cornerstone in democratising access to the world’s most diverse selection of immersive experiences.” said Cher Wang, CEO of HTC.

Viveport will offer a plethora of sections, be it; education, design, art, social, video, music, sports, health, fashion, travel, news, shopping, creative tools, and more. Viveport’s selection will grow fast and continue growing, and interestingly enough will offer not only a VR store, but will also be accessible from web browsers, desktop, and as a mobile app.

Now as exciting as that is, we’ve also got something else here, HTC Vive has just announced a training initiative of sorts. Third party developers and hardware makers will be trained in person in Asia to compliment programs by Valve and Synapse in the US in order to create more Vive accessories. Not just more of what we have now, but new and interesting tools to push the boundaries and deepen or virtual experiences. Alan Yates, a Valve Engineer, states that making technologies like OpenVR tracking available to more partners will be an important step in evolving virtual reality. And I really thinks that’s the truth, the more who have their hands on this technology, the more we’ll be able to enrich our experience, and the faster it will grow.

More information on both these topics, being Viveport and peripherals, we’ll have more news coming in the next few months. Thanks for reading “VR News, Is There Any? There Is? Let’s Write About It.” See you next time!


Official Press Release

Los Angeles, USA – August 5, 2016 – Today at VRLA, the world’s largest virtual reality expo, the team at Vive announced VIVEPORT™, the destination for VR content and experiences. Viveport will be available to customers later this fall and will launch a developer beta soon. Building on the fast growth and success of great VR games, Viveport features immersive experiences across additional categories and introduces an update to Vive Home, a personal and customisable virtual environment. Viveport will soon invite both the creator community and customers to discover, create, connect, watch, and shop for the things they love and need in life.

 “Our mission is to unleash human imagination from the limitations of reality, and Viveport will be an important cornerstone in democratising access to the world’s most diverse selection of immersive experiences,” said Cher Wang, CEO of HTC.

Viveport will feature a wide range of VR experiences across education, design, art, social, video, music, sports, health, fashion, travel, news, shopping, creativity tools, and more.  The Viveport store will be available in Vive headsets, web browsers, and as a PC and mobile app. Together with the global community of content creators and developers, Viveport will provide all customers with a unique and fast-growing selection of apps and experiences.

 “We believe equal access to virtual reality experiences will make the world a better place; enhancing our daily lives and the way we connect with everything. An important goal for the Viveport team is to enable developers to reach a global audience and grow their business,” said Rikard Steiber, Senior Vice President of Viveport.

Viveport is built to be responsive to content creators and developers, empowering them to drive long-term engagement and monetisation. Viveport will feature pay-to-download, in-app-purchases, subscriptions, and more revenue generating opportunities. In addition, Viveport will continue to roll out new platform features supporting content creation, distribution, and customer engagement.

We now welcome new content creators and developers to join the Viveport community, and register on http://developer.vive.com, joining the thousands of developers who have already started their journey with us. Also follow our blog on http://blog.htcvive.com for more information.

 

Taipei, Taiwan – August 5, 2016 – HTC, creator of the HTC Vive™, the most advanced virtual reality system on the market, today announced that it will begin working with third party developers and hardware makers to expand the accessories and peripherals ecosystem for the HTC Vive. HTC will hold in-person training courses in Asia to complement the courses being provided in the US by Valve and Synapse. These training courses will provide development resources, software for developing tracked accessories and peripherals, technical support for integration, and go-to-market resources when their products are ready. The program is expected to facilitate rapid development of innovative hardware solutions to create new ways for people to interact with their virtual world.

At this early stage in the development of the VR ecosystem, the whole industry must work together to overcome the barriers to ubiquitous adoption of VR.  By enabling third party developers to create accessories and peripherals, HTC is allowing the industry to create high quality products much faster. And because of HTC Vive’s position as market leader in the VR space, hardware partners will have access to a large installed base of existing customers, channels and content.

“We are extremely excited about the potential mid- to long-term impact of our decision with our partner Valve to simultaneously open up our respective technologies in order to accelerate growth in the VR industry,” said Cher Wang, Chairwoman and CEO of HTC. “The new wave of innovation this program will enable is going to be amazing to watch, the biggest winners will be the consumers and business customers around the world.”

Alan Yates, Valve Engineer, said “Making this OpenVR tracking technology available to more partners is an extremely important step in the evolution of virtual reality and 3D tracking. We are very confident that doing so will result in new and innovative experiences for all VR customers.”

More details and applications for the Vive accessories development and training program will be available soon at www.htcvive.com

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