Every time you put on the headset, it adjusts to match your interpupillary distance. Anyone who has received a prescription for glasses is familiar with this process. If the lenses are not aligned with the distance between your eyes, you may look through the edges of the lenses and get a highly distorted view. HTC counters this with motorized lenses and internal eye-tracking that detects how far apart your eyes are and moves the lens to the appropriate distance.
This is a useful feature, I just wish it didn't do this every time I put the headset on. Luckily, you can turn it off in the system settings, but I immediately found it annoying if I turned off my headset for just a second – usually for some app or another to deal with some setup process detail. For – only to forget the headset entirely the second I slip it back where my eyes are. I think the idea is to adjust for individual users, but perhaps a good middle ground would be to ask users if they want to readjust every so often or offer a shortcut button.
I was also annoyed by how quickly the lenses fogged up. The foam on the headset wasn't particularly breathable, and the lenses would fog up within seconds. Eventually, this will go away as the headset heats up, but it's still annoying. These are the kinds of minor flaws I'd be eager to overlook on a more accessible headset, but for a device whose price starts at $1,000, it's hard to ignore.
immersion and control
Considering competitors like meta quest 3sAnd apple vision proThe Vive Focus Vision is designed as a mixed-reality headset. The passthrough view is solid enough to see your surroundings and not bump into anything, although video is still grainy and washed out. I even tried walking a few steps to my fridge and by the time I made it, there he was. Now! Enough gaps to make it feel disorienting.
HTC's controllers are similar to the Meta Quest 3's controllers, with few buttons, few triggers, and full motion tracking. It also supports hand tracking, which worked great in my experience, although sometimes getting my cursor to click on the right button with my fingers can be a little frustrating.