St Petersburg, Florida – January 16, 2017 The battle in Virtual Reality is heating up. Since the launch of the HTC Vive, it has been acclaimed for its sub-millimeter tracking and amazing room scale experiences. However, its users have had to sacrifice the highest end Virtual Reality experiences at the expense of comfort. The Vive’s competitors, Oculus Rift and Sony’s Playstation VR (PSVR), give their users an arguably more comfortable experience in virtual worlds.
This all changed at CES 2017 when HTC announced the Deluxe Audio Strap for the HTC Vive. This new strap is more rigid than the stock strap provided by HTC, and includes integrated audio that rivals the headphones that come stock on the Oculus Rift. With this announcement, Vive owners could finally look forward to a comfortable experience that rivaled the Oculus Rift; despite the price and release date of the Deluxe Audio Strap not being announced any further than Q2 2017.
What about Sony’s PSVR? Its latest offering into the world of virtual reality has provided a different solution to putting a screen in front of your eyes. Instead of resting the weight of the headset on your face, Sony decided to put the weight on the user’s forehead. This led their headset to be considered by most reviewers to be the most comfortable, despite being the heaviest.
Could Vive users ever hope to enjoy the same kind of comfort provided by PSVR with the unrivaled tracking and slew of experiences available on Vive? This is where a plucky startup called SynergyWiz is hoping to find it’s niche. Just a few days after CES, SynergyWiz announced a Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1552002329/revolve-for-vive) for their latest product called rEvolve. In a tagline, it “moves Vive’s weight to forehead, and it makes the Vive a flip-up display”. The rEvolve Kickstarter reached its modest goal within a single day and is now looking for additional backing to assist with up front manufacturing expenses.
This competition is nothing but excellent news for current Vive owners, as they will now have choices for how they would like to experience virtual reality in 2017. With the Deluxe Audio Strap by HTC they have a trusted name providing a more comfortable strap with integrated audio. However, if consumers decide to invest in rEvolve they will have the same quality of comfort previously only available to PSVR users, with the bonus of a flip up display that lets them see the real world at a moments notice without taking the headset off.
This kind of competition is healthy for the virtual reality market and harkens back to the days of Betamax vs. VHS. Ultimately, there will be a winner on how users prefer to wear their virtual reality headsets, but until then it will be up to each individual user to decide.
SynergyWiz, Inc., A Florida Corporation in the product development business is comprised of industry leading professionals that have worked for or with top Fortune 100 companies including General Electric, Procter and Gamble, American Express, Walmart, Target, Google, and Zynga. Learn more about rEvolve and SynergyWiz at www.SynergyWiz.com/revolve