Taiwan-based smartphone vendor HTC Corp (宏達電) and Taiwanese PC brand Micro-Star International Co (微星科技) are to jointly demonstrate their efforts in virtual reality (VR) technologies at the Tokyo Game Show, Micro-Star said yesterday.
At the show, which runs from Thursday through Sunday, Micro-Star is to introduce the VR One, touted as the world’s lightest VR backpack PC, which will support the HTC Vive, HTC’s first VR headset.
Micro-Star said that the VR One, with a weight of only 3.6kg, is expected to render greater mobility and freedom for VR gaming, adding that the new VR PC, which sports two battery packs for 1.5 hours of non-stop use, will give HTC Vive users a better VR gaming experience.
The HTC Vive is one of HTC’s gambits to diversify from its core smartphone market, which is saturated and intensely competitive.
Jointly developed by HTC and US video game supplier Valve, the HTC Vive was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in March last year. The headset is equipped with tracked controllers that allow wearers to inspect objects from any angle and interact with their surroundings.
The VR headset is available worldwide and Japan has been targeted by HTC as one of its most important markets.
HTC said that with Micro-Star, it would launch a special sales package bundling Vive with VR One in the Japanese market and sales of the package would be available from Micro-Star’s Japanese distributors early next month.
The VR One is to be available in stores in Taiwan by the end of next month with a price tag of NT$69,900 (US$2,204), Micro-Star said.
In addition to the VR One, Micro-Star said it is also to launch several high-efficiency gaming notebook models at the Tokyo Game Show.
Micro-Star is one of HTC’s strategic partners in global VR development.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS