Earlier this year at Mobile World Congress, HTC announced their own virtual reality headset. Although it’s not just any virtual reality headset as they’ve partnered with Valve for the HTC Vive – and it’s not yet available. So it’s going to be pretty high-end and be able to do a lot more than the Gear VR from Samsung or Cardboard from Google. And now, word is coming out of Europe that HTC and Audi have signed an agreement for Audi to use HTC Vive in their flagship shops next year. The purpose of this is to allow potential customers to review as well as test drive a vehicle without getting into the car.
HTC’s chairperson, Cher Wang, also noted in this announcement that this cooperation between her company and Audi will be initiating the integration between various business activities and virtual reality. Which is said to be a pretty big market in the next few years. Wang added that VR devices will be used in the fashion, medicare, entertainment, media and education industries in the near future. Wang also added that HTC is able to cooperate with government agencies to use the HTC Vive to promote government policies as well as tourism, which would be pretty interesting for tourists, and involve much less walking.
The company has been offering demos of the HTC Vive at all of the big mobile shows since announcing it at MWC last March. They’ve also traveled the US and other parts of the world doing demos as well. HTC is doing a pretty good job of getting the word out there that the Vive is a great Virtual Reality headset, but the real issue here is going to be the price. The Gear VR is already around $200 and the HTC Vive is said to be quite a bit more than that. We’ll have to wait and see what the price is like, but we know gamers are definitely going to want to pick one up. The HTC Vive is said to be available in the beginning of 2016. It’s already been delayed a few times, so let’s hope it actually becomes available in the beginning of next year.