Mobile World Congress 2015: HTC Partners With Valve To Launch Vive VR Headset

Smartphone manufacturer HTC and video game developer Valve are the next two companies to enter the virtual reality ring. The new contenders announced the Vive virtual reality headset on Sunday during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona -- the latest to square off against competitors like Microsoft's HoloLens, Razer’s OSVR, Facebook’s Oculus Rift and more.

The Vive will be constructed by HTC and powered by Valve’s Steam VR platform.

HTC and Valve promise the Vive will be useful in everyday life -- from learning to traveling and entertainment to communication. The companies also claim the Vive will set itself apart from its competition with its ability to simulate an experience that encompasses the scale and size of a full room, allowing users to explore a vast, realistic three-dimensional environment and interact with the objects inside.

“It’s rare that a company has an opportunity to forever transform the ways in which people interact with the world and communicate with each other but that is exactly what we plan to do with Valve,” Cher Wang, chairwoman at HTC said on Sunday during the conference.

HTC is conducting demos of the device at Mobile World Congress and Valve is holding demonstrations during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which kicked off on Monday.

The device’s developer edition will use two 1200 x 1080 displays that will refresh at 90 frames per second. This will eliminate jitter and achieve “photorealistic imagery,” HTC said in a press release.

Valve and HTC and expecting to launch the Vive Developer Edition this spring, with a regular edition sometime before the end of 2015.