Unexpectedly on a Friday night, Valve has surprise launched a teaser site featuring a brand-new virtual reality headset, called the Valve Index, that appears to be a device of its own making and not one in partnership with its longtime VR partner HTC.
Alongside the photo, text reads “Upgrade your experience. May 2019” suggesting a near-term full announcement or release date of what is likely a high-end VR system.
It has two big wide-angle cameras, implying that it will support inside-out tracking so that either external tracking stations are optional, or so that tracking is better all-round. On the left you can see that it also has an IPD (interpupillary distance) slider to accommodate for people with abnormally spaced eyes. This suggests that it’s meant for the mass market.
Dialing up the brightness and the contrast, and you can see four small dots on each side of the headset. They look somewhat similar to the infrared dots used for tracking on the HTC Vive, so regardless of the Index’s ability to inside-out track, it will most likely support Valve’s SteamVR tracking stations, called Lighthouses.
The Index will feature a 135° Field of View, which is somewhat better than the 110° FOV that both the Vive Pro and Rift S have. They also say it will come with the same 2880 x 1600 resolution as the Vive Pro, which is a hair better than the 2560 x 1440 on the Rift S.
We’ll hopefully get some more information ahead of the May 2019 target, which may just be a reveal event window and not at all related to the launch. Valve will be entering a crowded marketplace, with Oculus planning to launch both its standalone Quest and Rift S headsets this spring and HTC having just launched its enterprise product, the Focus Plus, and gearing up to launch its new Vive Cosmos headset some time this year or next.
