The HTC Vive Flow appears to be a bug-eyed headset designed for meditation.
Even if you put aside its decidedly bug-eyed appearance, the leaked HTC Vive Flow is a baffling headset. By all accounts, it’s supposed to be a standalone consumer VR device that’s made for activities like meditating and streaming media. It also will allegedly come with its own take on the metaverse. In a somewhat distant feature, this sort of device might be the norm. Right now, it sounds an awful lot like it doesn’t know what exactly it’s supposed to be. These first details about this device emerged from a Protocol report earlier this week. Then prolific leaker Evan Blass tweeted a series of images that revealed what the HTC Vive Flow looks like, its $499 price tag, and that it would ship starting in November. The Flow, while standalone, also looks in some of these photos to be tethered to some sort of cylindrical device. In others, it appears to rely on your smartphone as a Bluetooth controller and for phone-to-VR streaming. That jives with the Protocol report, which says the headset will not ship with any controllers and will sport a chipset that’s less powerful than the one in the Oculus Quest 2. So, in other words, gaming and any other processor-intensive activities aren’t gonna be possibly. OK. Well, supposedly this thing has a metaverse called Viveport Verse. Protocol claims that this metaverse will include avatars and cross-device functionality while also exploring a “variety of events.” The Viveport Verse apparently includes an NFT showroom? Somehow this thing will also support user-generated content. All on a not-very-powerful sounding chipset, and with content that’s been repurposed from Mozilla’s Hubs VR project.
