Photo illustration: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol
The VR race is heating up again

Good morning! This Wednesday, HTC struggles to catch up in the VR space, the chip shortage comes for Apple, Coinbase gets into NFTs and another former Facebook employee wants to talk to Congress.
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HTC is going to unveil its newest VR device tomorrow: The Vive Flow is designed as a lightweight consumer headset optimized for media consumption that will ship without controllers, as we were able to report this week. (Here's an early peek at what it looks like.)
The Flow is HTC's latest attempt to compete with Facebook in the consumer VR space. It's something the company used to be quite good at: The original Vive was at one point considered the gold standard in PC VR, thanks in part to tracking hardware engineered by Valve that made it possible to operate a much larger playspace than what was supported by Facebook's Oculus Rift.
Still, HTC is playing catch-up. Facebook has poured billions of dollars into both a content ecosystem and standalone VR tech, which eventually resulted in the launch of the Quest in 2019.
Now, HTC aims to reenter the consumer market with a unique proposition. Pre-announcement marketing material hints at plans to bill the new device as a headset for people looking to meditate, relax and lean back. Casual VR that won't require you to break a sweat.
Competing with Facebook won't be easy. HTC doesn't have nearly the same resources available to lure developers onto its platform as Facebook, which has been busy buying game studios and doling out money to third-party developers. And without developers creating unique experiences optimized for the device, the Flow may not look all that different from the Oculus Go.
But Facebook hasn't won yet. VR is still young, and there are plenty of companies still vying to unseat the market leader.
What unites most of these companies is that they have deep pockets, allowing them to spend billions of dollars to seed their own VR ecosystems. And that's something that HTC simply can't afford.
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Just imagine if the iPhone had a USB-C port. Everybody would always have the right cable for everything, and even if they didn't they'd be able to borrow the right cable, because there would only be one kind of cable to borrow! It would be like some kind of tech utopia. Anyway, while everyone was dreaming about that, Ken Pillonel made it a reality for himself.
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