HTC Vive Focus Vision — Mixed Reality and PC VR Headset + Controllers — Consumer Edition

Not for connected PC VR, bad lenses for a product in this price range
I’ve owned a few HTC Vive products, and was ready for an upgrade… but this isn’t it. I knew these came with Fresnel lenses but figured the bump in resolution and auto-IPD would make up for it. I was very wrong… My use case is connected PCVR, primarily seated racing.First the good – the additional resolution is great! The headset is reasonably weighted but well balanced, with the battery in the back. I wear glasses, and the fit was a bit tight with my glasses often getting stuck in the face pads, but overall it was comfortable. I didn’t have a chance to use these for long periods, but compared to my other VR headsets, I would say these are in the slightly more comfortable region. You can feel the fan kick on to keep your face cool during VR sessions, the pads are removable and comfortable, and it offers a lot of adjustments. I also appreciate the speakers connected to the strap but positioned to offer you great sound without cutting out exterior noise – that way you can hear when someone is trying to get your attention while you’re in VR.  I have no real issues with the controllers – they were light and responsive. Yes the Valve Index controllers are better, but the Focus Vision controllers are light and balanced and offer all the features you’d expect. It does come with a dual USB-C charging cable… but no charger. That’s a huge miss… you shouldn’t need to purchase anything at this price range, and likely most users have a spare USB-C charger, but still…My first big issue was my fault – during setup, I picked up a controller and accidentally hit a button which selected Korean as the default language. Even though this kit was intended to be connected to a PC, the headset saves your setup, so I had to hunt around to find a factory reset (hold the battery and volume down until the display comes on, let go of the battery button, wait for the menu to pop up and then use volume down to select factory reset. Hit the side auto-IPD button to select, and let it run). There should be a way to go back and select languages… that’s a terrible design. It took opening a ticket with HTC and waiting a few days for a response to find the factory reset settings…You need the overpriced PC connection cable to connect to a PC – though it can work over Wifi to a limited extent, my experience was not great. I even set up a separate 5GHZ wifi just for my PC and Focus Vision. The connection was laggy… with the wired kit, it worked a handful of times but kept losing connectivity to my PC’s display port (a 4070ti). I moved it to my main gaming rig running a 4090 with the same issues. For the price of the connection kit, it should work flawlessly… but it doesn’t. On bootup, there’s maybe a 30% chance it detects my display port. When it doesn’t, I had to fiddle with shutting everything down, rebooting the headset and PC, and try again… it shouldn’t be this hard.Auto-IPD almost never worked, nor did eye tracking. On occasion, the auto-IPD would kick in for no reason and start adjustments… other times it wouldn’t work at all, forcing you to load up the main menu and make manual adjustments. I can see this being a huge pain over time, especially if you have more than one user with different settings. And those setting menus are sometimes static (they move with your head, not one that stays fixed so you can move around and focus on different areas). With the fresnel lenses, that means the bulk of some setup and config menus are too blurry to read. This is likely less of an issue with users who don’t wear glasses, but the setup and config shouldn’t include any static menus like this. I found that static menu issue more when it lost connectivity to PC over display port, so if you can get the PC cable working it may not be as much of an issue.Overall, this is a huge miss for HTC. In this price range, we should expect better lenses, it should include all the connectivity and cabling, and it should be flawless and easy to set up.

Great Headset
Pros:- Easy setup with auto-IPD adjustment.- Easy to start/stop VR games easily. There’s an extra battery in the headset, so you can hot swap the main battery without losing your place in a game. I haven’t tried this feature out yet, and I’m looking into getting another battery just for this.- Crisp and sharp display.- Mixed Reality passthrough is great! Feels very true to life.Cons:- Pricier than other options out there, but that’s reflected in the quality and features.

Constant coil noise from the cable, bad mic compared to the index, the screen is super low quality compared to a Quest 3 or Index. My eyes got dried out in 5 minutes by the internal fan, and I could barely fit the headset to my face properly like the Index can fit. The FOV is completely misleading, insane black barring.Yet it costs more than an Index?!?!.