Vive Focus Vision Hands-On: Lossless PC VR Through Fresnel Lenses

We recently went hands on with Vive Focus Vision, HTC's newest headset that launches today.

If you missed the announcement last month amidst all the Meta and Pico news, Vive Focus Vision is a refresh of Vive Focus 3 with color passthrough, eye tracking, more RAM, and support for lossless PC VR via a DisplayPort adapter.

While Vive Focus 3 was only officially sold to businesses, HTC is marketing Vive Focus Vision to consumers too, mostly as a PC VR headset via the $150 DisplayPort accessory. HTC's pitch here is that for $1150 you get a headset with higher resolution than Quest 3 and Pico 4 Ultra, with integrated eye tracking and lossless quality PC VR.

So does all this make Vive Focus Vision the new PC VR headset of choice? I attended HTC's launch event to find out.

Vive Focus Vision Has Eye Tracking & DisplayPort PC VR

HTC just announced Vive Focus Vision, a refresh of Vive Focus 3 with color passthrough, eye tracking, a DisplayPort PC VR addon, and more.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Comfort-wise, Vive Focus Vision feels exactly like its predecessor. It's hefty, weighing in at almost 800 grams total, but that weight is very well distributed, with the battery behind the thick rear padding, not in the visor itself. It never felt uncomfortable in my time with it, though I didn't wear it for more than 45 minutes at a time.

I wasn't able to try the passthrough of Vive Focus Vision at this event, but the lighting in the room was very dim, so I'm not sure it would have been a meaningful test. And in the context of PC VR, this doesn't much matter.

HTC had three demo stations set up, one seated with Automobilista 2 and the other two standing with Arizona Sunshine 2. All three used the DisplayPort adapter for lossless PC VR.

On both Arizona Sunshine 2 demo stations, I immediately noticed a strange issue where every few seconds a display frame would drop when rotating my head. Most VR users today have never seen a real full display frame drop, as modern VR compositors reproject the previous frame rotationally to eliminate them. When Oculus's Asynchronous Timewarp introduced this technique in 2015 it was a huge deal. Even a single display frame dropping in VR is clearly perceptible and jarring, and that was the case here.

HTC told me that this was an issue with a pre-release version of the cable, and claimed it won't be an issue in the shipping version. The third demo station, running the Automobilista 2 racing game, did not have this issue, so I spent most of my time playing it.

Like with Sony's for PlayStation VR2, HTC's adapter takes an included 5 meter USB-C cable from the headset on one side, and DisplayPort, USB-A, and mains power on the other.

Powered by an RTX 4090 laptop, the combination of the 2448×2448 panels and lossless video signal provided image quality a noticeable step above the compressed Quest 3 setup I usually use for VR sim racing, with genuinely impressive detail - in the center of the lens at least. Vive Focus Vision continues to use fresnel lenses, not pancake, complicating the visual quality question. As with all fresnel lenses, I saw a noticeable blur anywhere beyond of the center of the lens, and in practice this means you'll rotate your head more and your eyeballs less. In dark scenes with bright objects, I also saw significant glare illuminating the fresnel rings.

In the context of sim racing this wasn't a dealbreaker by any means, though, and perhaps even preferable over the lower resolution and compressed image of a Quest 3 on PC VR. And don't be so quick to lump Vive Focus Vision in with the other new fresnel lens headset, Quest 3S. Vive Focus Vision's eye tracking and motorized lenses combine to automatically horizontally align the lenses almost perfectly with your eyes, meaning the optical fit is much better than being restricted to just three steps.

In PC VR titles which support dynamic foveated rendering via third-party tools like OpenXR Toolkit, Vive Focus Vision's eye tracking should also let you increase quality further than what you'd get on headsets without it. Automobilista 2 isn't one of those titles, though, and your mileage will vary when using such tools.

The most common use case of Vive Focus Vision's eye tracking in the consumer space, other than the automatic IPD adjustment, will likely be driving avatar eyes in VRChat. With HTC's $100 Vive Facial Tracker addon, VRChat enthusiasts should be able to add face tracking too, and with a few hundred more dollars of Vive Ultimate Trackers they can easily add body tracking.

So far I've focused on Vive Focus Vision as a PC VR headset, since that's how HTC is mainly pitching it to consumers. Yes, it also works fully standalone, but its store has only a tiny fraction of what you'd find on Quest or even on Pico, so I doubt more than a handful of consumers will care about this. Even in enterprise, Focus 3 was more often used as a wireless PC VR headset than truly standalone, and I don't expect this trend to change with Focus Vision. This is likely why HTC chose to add new features instead of upgrade the XR2 chipset.

So let's return to the question that prompted this article: is Vive Focus Vision the new PC VR headset of choice?

If you're a PC VRChat user who wants your eyes and expressions tracked but don't like the compression artifacts of Quest Pro, maybe. But if you don't care about eye tracking, you could get even higher resolution with better lenses at a lower cost from Pimax Crystal Light, or get the rich colors and contrast of OLED with PlayStation VR2's PC adapter. And if you're okay with compression, you can of course just pick up a Quest 3 or Pico 4 Ultra and enjoy the pancake lenses experience of looking with your eyes instead of always rotating your head.

The problem for HTC is that even as PC VR headset, Vive Focus Vision faces steep competition, and it's unclear how many consumers care enough about its unique features to choose it.