The HTC Vive Cosmos is available for pre-sale starting today, and we finally have a price to dissect. The headset will cost consumers $699 and will be launched shortly. They plan on having the headset at the doors of customers on October 3rd, and in authorized retail stores the same day. This is officially the end of the original HTC Vive.
There are a handful of specs that have been released, and there are a few changes we are going to make note of. The original Vive had the lowest angular resolution of any PC VR headset on the market, so the Cosmos is coming to save the year. The Cosmos is sporting a 1440 x 1700 LCD screen, which is a load better than anything else right now. It has a higher pixel rate than the HP Reverb, Pimax 5K and 8K, Vive Pro Eye, and even the astonishing Valve Index. The picture is going to be crystal clear on the HTC Vive Cosmos, but that is only half of the battle.
For better or worse, most headsets on the market have adopted inside-out tracking. The Cosmos follows the same plan. This new headset will allow the users to connect to their PC right out of the box without having to set up the Steam Base Stations, and can focus on their perfect picture. The headset offers six cameras on the headset itself, giving it the most any other headset has featured yet. This tracking system is not only responsible for tracking six degrees of movement from the headset, but from the controller as well.
Vive also boasts that the Cosmos is tracking controllers at a whopping 310°, but we found that it is slightly off of that, and has a hard time re-establishing tracking when they are behind your head or back at any time. This isn’t anything a nice software update can’t fix, as we saw this problem with the Oculus Rift S very early on.
Another similarity with the Rift S is the Guardian capability. When you are leaving the play area with the Cosmos, you will be able to see the world around you. The Cosmos is slightly better for this as it is in full color and isn’t going to give you a bad case of motion sickness. If you are going to be exploring the edges of the play area, the Cosmos is going to keep you safe at all times.
The infamous wand controllers have been replaced with something that looks at the newest Oculus Touch controllers. The Cosmos controllers are tracked by the lights on the top, and not by any hidden sensors. Because this headset offers external tracking, if you want to use controllers with that, you will need to have the Vive wand controllers. The new Cosmos controllers will be powered by two AA batteries in the controller, which can make the weight add up very quickly.
This is the start of the end of the original Vive headset. HTC has said that they will be pulling the headset from stores and online very soon, and the headset itself will also no longer be under warranty. The Cosmos is supposed to be the successor to the Vive and it should be for a while. On the official Vive website, you can explore the different mods that are going to be available with the Cosmos within weeks of the launch date. For a price point of $699, you are going to get a nice headset for gaming, but it isn’t going to be too far off of the Oculus Rift S.
