HTC will be announcing their new standalone VR headset at CES next month and has already confirmed that its privacy policy will be leagues ahead of Meta.
After teasing a new VR headset on Twitter this October, HTC finally confirmed that it will be announcing a new standalone VR headset to compete with the Meta Quest 2. After releasing the Vive Cosmos back in 2019, the first standalone VR headset from the company failed pretty terribly as it had tracking problems. The Vive Cosmos Elite – which came shortly after had to fix this issue with the addition of base stations. Hopefully, this unnamed headset won't face the same issues.
Shen Ye, the global head of product (via The Verge), disclosed that the headset will have front and side-facing cameras. These cameras, unlike those on the Meta Quest 2, will pass a colour video feed to the headset meaning you can have more immersive mixed-reality experiences. Colour passthrough was a big selling point of the Meta Quest Pro meaning this could potentially be a great middle ground, but the HTC headset will have a depth sensor allowing for more efficient tracking.
HTC also claimed that the headset can be used for gaming, entertainment and exercise like your standard virtual reality set-up, but it will also have 'more powerful use cases' within productivity and enterprise. The headset will feature two hours of battery life, be fully standalone and support controllers with six degrees of freedom as well as hand tracking.
Ye stated that HTC was working on sophisticated privacy protections which would feature an encrypted local partition meaning that it would exceptionally difficult for outsiders to access data on it. He also said that at current, virtual reality "companies are trying to vacuum up and take personal data" allowing them to sell their headsets at a cheaper rate - directly speaking about Meta - which is something HTC want to avoid. This mean's the headset will likely come in at a higher price point than the competition, but we don't have confirmation of this yet.
Is Meta really Zucking up all of our data?
Meta hasn't made it easy to find out how much of our data it is collecting with relatively vague privacy guidelines for its virtual reality headsets. Within these guidelines, it states clearly that camera data is collected including that of your hand size and your playing area when you set a guardian boundary. It also states that the "Meta Quest Pro only collects the data needed for your device" but doesn't confirm what this data specifically is, meaning there are many ways it can justify different data sets as essential.
It doesn't disclose how much microphone data Meta is collecting, meaning that Zuckerberg really could be listening to you at all times of the day, including when your headset is in standby mode. Since both the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro can respond to voice commands when in use, similar to Google Home and Amazon Alexa, such as "Hey Facebook", we could see similar privacy issues faced by these smart home products. However, there are ways to take back your privacy when using smart devices.
HTC has been quite clear that it is hoping to fill the gap in the market that Meta has left behind by providing a great and reliable standalone VR headset which doesn't farm consumer data. However, it has stated that the reason why the Meta VR options have been so affordable - with the Quest 2 coming in at £399 / $399 / AU$630 - is due to this data farming.
This does make me wince slightly when I try to imagine what the cost of this new headset could be. The reason why Meta Quest 2 was so popular was because it made VR available to so many people by being standalone, and having a low price tag, and it feels like HTC may miss the mark with their new headset.
