StyM
03-29-2017, 03:47 AM
https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/29/htc-vive-group-edition-education-schools-china/
The folks over at HTC Vive have been talking up the potential of VR in education since day one, and this year, they're hoping to make a bigger push into this space by focusing on multi-user scenarios. At this week's Vive Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen, the company announced the Vive Group Edition bundle for China, which includes ten Business Edition headsets plus two Business Edition base stations for 49,999 yuan or about $7,260, and it's due to ship in May. This offers a much lower entry barrier for commercial users, as it's almost a 40-percent saving when compared to buying ten full Business Edition kits, meaning schools and small businesses are more likely to afford the system.
For those who are wondering, yes, the Group Edition package is missing the controllers plus extra base stations, and for a good reason. According to the company, the idea here stemmed from a growing number of customer requests for high-end multi-user VR solutions, but that quickly becomes costly as each headset needs to be hooked up to a relatively powerful PC. As such, the only way to lower the cost without too much compromise is by sticking to the bare necessities on the VR side: a number of headsets and just two base stations per room.
While the lack of controllers here may sound worrying, HTC Vive's China President Alvin Wang Graylin assured me that the lean kit is perfectly suitable for light interaction use cases. These can be as simple as watching a video together (so cinemas can also take advantage of this package) to something more fun like going on virtual tours -- be it a seated experience or a room-scale experience. I can imagine students enjoying geography, biology and history lessons more by being virtually transported to different places, and they'll also get a better sense of scale by walking around an animated solar system; these can all get by without controllers, and Graylin added that there are plenty more of such education VR apps in the works.
https://s.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/dcc425686af7dd67b4510edb83d512/205104517/170328-HTCvive-SZ-4986.jpg
The folks over at HTC Vive have been talking up the potential of VR in education since day one, and this year, they're hoping to make a bigger push into this space by focusing on multi-user scenarios. At this week's Vive Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen, the company announced the Vive Group Edition bundle for China, which includes ten Business Edition headsets plus two Business Edition base stations for 49,999 yuan or about $7,260, and it's due to ship in May. This offers a much lower entry barrier for commercial users, as it's almost a 40-percent saving when compared to buying ten full Business Edition kits, meaning schools and small businesses are more likely to afford the system.
For those who are wondering, yes, the Group Edition package is missing the controllers plus extra base stations, and for a good reason. According to the company, the idea here stemmed from a growing number of customer requests for high-end multi-user VR solutions, but that quickly becomes costly as each headset needs to be hooked up to a relatively powerful PC. As such, the only way to lower the cost without too much compromise is by sticking to the bare necessities on the VR side: a number of headsets and just two base stations per room.
While the lack of controllers here may sound worrying, HTC Vive's China President Alvin Wang Graylin assured me that the lean kit is perfectly suitable for light interaction use cases. These can be as simple as watching a video together (so cinemas can also take advantage of this package) to something more fun like going on virtual tours -- be it a seated experience or a room-scale experience. I can imagine students enjoying geography, biology and history lessons more by being virtually transported to different places, and they'll also get a better sense of scale by walking around an animated solar system; these can all get by without controllers, and Graylin added that there are plenty more of such education VR apps in the works.
https://s.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/dcc425686af7dd67b4510edb83d512/205104517/170328-HTCvive-SZ-4986.jpg