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.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
RSS