HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday said that it has teamed up with a number of companies in Japan to promote sales of its first virtual-reality (VR) headset, the Vive.
The company said it would work with distributors, as well as hardware and software developers in Akihabara, a well-known electronics shopping district in Tokyo, in its bid to enter the Japanese VR market.
They include VR developers Epic Games Japan and Unity Technologies Japan, game software supplier Namco Bandai, VR content investor Colopl Next, gaming Web site operator Gree, video game developer Square Enix, semiconductor developer AMD Japan and distributor Degica, HTC said.
Degica told reporters that it hopes its cooperation with HTC will provide consumers with opportunities to experience the Vive, particularly among families in Japan.
The Vive launched for sale in retail stores in Japan for ¥99,815 (US$987) and the headset has been bundled with certain PC models at ¥149,800, the company said.
The Vive is equipped with tracked controllers that allow wearers to inspect objects from every angle and interact with their surroundings.
HTC said the Vive has been well-received in Japan since online sales started in April.
Starting yesterday, Japanese consumers were able to make reservations at 36 authorized stores to test a VR headset, the company said.
So far, SteamVR, a content platform under Valve Corp, has provided more than 250 exclusive titles for the Vive.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day