HSINCHU (TVBS News) － It's been a busy 12 months for HTC, and it looks like the Taiwanese VR headset manufacturer always has one last trick up its sleeve with new products slated this year and next.
Speaking at the annual convention of the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association, the HTC Vive Global VP of Corporate Development, Alvin Wang Graylin, told TVBS that Taiwan has a place in the game.
"Taiwan right now is the center of innovation for semiconductor manufacturing," the HTC executive said. "And the majority of high-end chips are made in Taiwan. So, more success and more demand for high-end semiconductors are going to be meaning more success for Taiwan."
Taiwan is a major producer of chips for cars and smartphones, data centers, and fighter jets. Virtual- and augmented-reality products also require advanced chips produced by Taiwan's semiconductor industry, including TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, and Asia's most valuable listed firm.
"HTC has been at the forefront of XR and VR development for the last seven or eight years," he said. "So you know, we were the first in the industry to come out with six degrees of freedom devices, allowing somebody to walk around the entire virtual space and feel immersed in that technology."
That's something that nobody else has done up to that point. In the age of the Metaverse, companies are increasingly aligning themselves with the new age characterized by virtual reality. HTC, in particular, has been at the forefront of developing applications for the Metaverse.
An easy way to think about the Metaverse is to describe it as the next generation of the internet that we've all been using for the last several decades. But instead of a 2D Internet, it is going to become a 3D Internet where the content is virtual worlds instead of Websites.
A lot of people will still be using non-VR, XR devices to use the Metaverse for the near term, according to Wang Graylin. In the next few years, a lot of people will use their phones and their PCs to (access) it. But gradually, more and more people will move to use XR devices using VR and AR devices as their main interface to this new internet.
HTC already sells a string of VR headsets, including the most compact in the industry, the Vive Flow. Released last year, it’s a unique headset selling in a category of its own. It is equipped with an onboard chip for all computing tasks, powered via a USB cable.
"If we look at the device industry, for phones and PCs, it's flat now and, in some cases, starting to come down, right, because those technologies started to mature,” he went on. "With XR, it is going to become the next major device that we will depend on even more than we depend on phones today."
"So, having that technology and being at the core of the development of technology is really where HTC finds its future," he continued. "We're very excited about the potential, and we see the longer term, the XR device market will be as big or maybe bigger than the phone and PC industry put together.
VR is actively expanding into new spaces, and the list of applications is increasing with new areas, such as medicine, real estate, and sports, meaning that the future of industry leaders, such as HTC, is bright.