HTC’s Vive Focus Vision Offers a Glimpse of Crystal Clear VR—When It Works

Every time you put on the headset, it adjusts to match your interpupillary distance. Anyone who’s ever gotten a prescription for glasses is familiar with this process. If the lenses aren’t aligned with the distance between your eyes, you can end up looking through the edges of the lenses and getting a much more distorted view. HTC combats this with motorized lenses and internal eye-tracking that detects how far apart your eyes are and physically moves the lenses to the appropriate distance.

It’s a handy feature, I wish it didn’t do this every single time I put on the headset. Fortunately, you can turn this off in the system settings, but I quickly found it irritating if I took my headset off for just a second—usually to deal with some setup process detail for some app or another—only for the headset to completely forget where my eyes are the second I slip it back on. I get that the idea is to adjust for different users, but maybe a good middle ground would be to ask users if they want to readjust each time or offer a shortcut button.

I was also annoyed at how quickly the lenses would fog up. The foam on the headset wasn’t particularly breathable, and the lenses would fog up within seconds. Eventually, it would even out as the headset warmed up, but it’s still annoying. These are the kinds of minor flaws I’d be tempted to overlook on a more accessible headset, but for a device that starts at $1,000, it’s tough to overlook.

Immersion and Control

In keeping with competitors like the Meta Quest 3S, and Apple Vision Pro, the Vive Focus Vision is designed to be a mixed-reality headset. The passthrough view is solid enough to see your surroundings and not bump into anything, though the video is still grainy and washed out. I also tried walking a few steps to my fridge and, while I made it, there’s just enough lag to make it feel disorienting.

HTC’s controllers are similar to the ones for the Meta Quest 3, with a few buttons, a couple of triggers, and full motion tracking. It also supports hand tracking, which worked pretty well in my experience, though at times it could be a bit frustrating to get my cursor to click on the right buttons with my fingers alone.