HTC Vive: developers react to Valve's virtual reality headset

Valve has finally revealed its VR intentions - but what do developers think of the Vive, the latest entry into an increasingly crowded market?

Just when you thought you had the consumer virtual reality market mapped out, along comes Valve, the veteran developer behind the dominant Steam gaming platform, to complicate things yet further.

At the Mobile World Congress on Sunday, smartphone manufacturer HTC announced the Vive, a powerful new VR headset, built in association with Valve, and featuring two 1200 x 1080 displays, a smooth 90-frames-per-second refresh rate and a bunch of motion tracking technologies: this includes two "base stations" that will work like Microsoft's Kinect, allowing the headset to track the player's movement within the room. Vive is also set to ship with two wireless controllers - although little was said about what these would look like.