HTC Leaders Hope Modular Vive Cosmos Will Appeal To Multiple Markets

Vive Cosmos, HTC’s newest consumer-driven VR headset, is designed to bring a new audience to VR. HTC leaders also want to reach people that find current systems inaccessible. That’s why it’s got inside-out tracking and improved design. It also has, in HTC’s words, Vive’s sharpest display yet.But VR enthusiasts won’t be left out of the mix.Vive General Manager Daniel O’Brien suggested as much to me at MWC this week. HTC still isn’t saying much about Vive Cosmos. I asked if HTC was working on another high-end headset for people who bought the original Vive. He suggested Cosmos is for those buyers.I also asked if the headset’s modular aspect would extend beyond platforms. Cosmos will run on both PC and, HTC hints, smartphones. O’Brien said yes, without saying much else. O’Brien: Everything that you’ll see from us over the next couple of years, whether it’s on the enterprise and B2B side or whether it’s on the consumer side is just looking at the friction points and trying to take them away. That’s seamlessly how we’re trying to approach the market.Feltham: So I would say there’s these three categories at Vive right now, then. That’s the enterprise, Cosmos represents, you’ve said before, a chance to grab a new audience, people that aren’t into VR yet. and then there’s this thing in the middle which is what the original Vive is: high-end, gaming, enthusiast. Is that something that you’re still working on in the hardware side and we’ll see the next high-end, gaming, enthusiast headset?