By now you’ve hopefully read our exclusive hands-on with TPCAST’s wireless upgrade kit for the HTC Vive. Another chance to pre-order the kit is coming tomorrow, but you’ll need to make friends in far places to get one.
Alvin W. Graylin, China Regional President of Vive at HTC recently confirmed that a second round of pre-orders for the device will be going live tomorrow, December 23rd, at 11:00pm Beijing time, but only for Chinese customers. The first round of pre-orders, which went live last month, were also only available in China, and sold out in around 18 minutes, so you’ll probably have to be fast to grab a kit if you can grab one at all.
@elizabethdscott @htcvive @UploadVR FYI, 2nd round of Pre-orders on 12/23 23:00 Beijing time at TPCast.cn but still only for China orders
— Alvin Wang Graylin (@AGraylin) December 22, 2016
In fact, Graylin recommended that anyone desperate for a device get some Chinese friends to help them out. A link to the pre-orders should appear on TPCAST’s official website.
@alexqgb @elizabethdscott @htcvive @UploadVR get friends in china to help make orders. 😉
— Alvin Wang Graylin (@AGraylin) December 22, 2016
The kit includes a receiver that users plug the Vive’s various cables into, a router that communicates with your PC, and a video transmitter to project images back to the headset. The company claims that it adds less than 2 milliseconds of latency to the headset.
This should be the version of the device with a smaller, headset-mounted battery that lasts two hours. A new version with a bigger battery, which is what we sampled for our hands-on, will be going on sale later, though we’ve asked TPCAST if this is still the case. The larger battery lasts about 5 hours and sits in your pocket. The smaller kit costs 1,499 RMB ($220.33).
As for an official US release, TPCAST CEO Michael Liu told UploadVR that it should happen “sometime next year” and that a final price for the region had not been set. He was very confident, however, that the device would pass FCC testing, which it is currently undergoing.
While we wait for the next batch of pre-orders to go live, take a look at our fresh gallery of images for the various components for the device.
