HTC looks at option to sell or demerge Vive

The most fun I had was on a moving horse saddle thing, where you basically hold a gun and play cowboy with your feet in the stirrups against zombies in a virtual desert! Awesome experience :)

It's wrong to consider VR as a gaming peripheral - the appeal is much wider.

Music visualization applications are astonishing and photogrammatry is compelling. I've often just sat in a virtual location enjoying the ambience. Music making and 3D modelling (both for leisure and for professional use), social VR, fitness, narrative/story-based, virtual tourism and educational applications - these are all genres that work much, much better in VR than on a flat monitor.

> given the limited games and limited quality of them

This is quite simply not true unless you have very specific tastes or unlimited free time. There is more good content available now than I would ever have time to play.

There is a lack of big-budget, AAA, 60+ hour gameplay titles mainly due to the economics of game production (creating a typical AAA title solely for VR would require it to sell for something like $1000 a unit to coup costs given the current user base) but there are several VR ports in the works including Doom, Skyrim and Fallout 4 from Bethesda by the end of the year.

But I can list a dozen incredibly good gaming experiences in VR off the top of my head. I rarely touch non-VR games now.

Yes - VR has room for improvement (FOV, lens quality and weight would be top of my list - the resolution is far from being a major problem and most others agree) and the cost needs to drop further for it to be mainstream.

But the tech is already compelling in a way that no other technology in my lifetime has shown itself to be. Count me as a true believer. I'd buy another rig immediately if I had to choose again.

First: it's always impressive. You just get teleported to a different world in which you can move around and look around. You can notice the screen at first but you just quickly forget about it as you immerse yourself in this new dimension. It's just incredible.

Second: a lot of demos you can try are kind of shitty. For example here in London you can play Serious Sam for 10 minutes for 6 quids and I wouldn't recommend that as a first experience as it's too simple and too limited.

To understand VR you need to try tilt brush, job simulator, the lab, the portal demo, ... These experiences are incredible and I haven't seen someone not impressed by them.

Having said that, I myself haven't bought an HTC Vive although I've been wanting for a very long time... just because I do not have a PC and this would increase the cost ten folds.

I own both a Vive and Rift, and apart from freelance work where I use those devices, I never take them out. Untangling all the cables, setting up the lighthouses, recalibrating the software, making sure the lighthouses are positioned well so there's no interference, asking my wife to stay out of the play area... It's a lot of work for an experience which ultimately leaves you with a headache after one hour of play (either from motion sickness, which I don't suffer from, or from the tightness of walking around with a heavy helmet on your head).

Fumbling with the headset to have a quick peek around the room to see where you're standing is also annoying, especially for people (like me, and many gamers, I presume) wearing glasses. It's so uncomfortable I risk damaging my expensive glasses and fall back to wearing an older pair. A screen works much better, especially if you can afford a nice 4K setup (which until recently boils down to the same price as a full-fledged VR setup).

I do have some hope for Microsoft's Hololens, though. I believe that augmented (or mixed) reality has a much better chance to lead to much richer experiences, in games but also video and creative work. Being able to play Minecraft on your living room's floor seems much cooler to me than in VR. You still have spatial awareness of what's around you, and there's hope that solutions for nearsighted people will be more elegant.

Daydream is a low effort also ran. It lacks good hardware, the quality is noticably worse than gear VR and supported phones are rare to find. Now that the galaxy S8 and note 8 are slated to support daydream, it will finally have decent hardware support. Let's see if Google does something interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.

This is the real secret sauce for Vive, and it's completely designed and owned by Valve. Combined with their lackluster new phone, I think the future is pretty grim for HTC.

But VR as a whole is still in its infancy. Some experiences don't work for users who are too tall or short (say, children). The install base is also still too small to run a profitable business creating just VR content.

No, it's gaining speed in fact. Most of the applications are not in consumer but in business. See the new Microsoft VR platform and the headsets from HP and Asus. Those are the reason the current Vive is not so hot anymore - they manage full movement without large cables and without difficult to set up beacons.

If Varjo's varied resolution technology with eye tracking which enables high resolution rendering only where it's needed succeeds as promised that could be a huge boon (http://www.varjo.com)

But - for professional applications, not games.

I got to compile (had to fix some bugs in the source), and played for about 5 minutes before the motion sickness hit hard.

As a division, Vive is doing very well but HTC is primarily a phone company which has been dying a slow death. From an overall strategic perspective it looks like HTC has no choice but to look for a buyer but as the article points out "A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer".

Ok, that was funny.

But somehow I'm guessing they probably don't want to manage manufacturing.

Prices are still to high, people need to get more experience in it and investors need to be convinced.

This takes a while.

Only because tec is so fast, doesn't mean vr is dead.

In the next years i'm guessing things like this will come or are on the way already: - VR Cafes - VR lighter, cheaper and with higher resolution - VR for industrie (especially training people in VR will be huge) - VR experience centers where you have VR / AR by having a VR Headset and interact with the Environment - VR for building houses, renovating flats