The Vive Flow Is VR for Downtime; Facebook Wants AR For Your Every Waking Moment

With its Vive VR headsets, HTC beat Facebook’s Oculus to market for a full room-scale virtual reality product. The Vive Flow, unveiled Thursday, will beat Facebook, potentially by a matter of years, to the release of a radically thinner VR headset. At the same time, being first might hold the Flow back.

The $499 Vive Flow is primarily intended as a device for relaxation. Other VR devices also claim to help people relax but the industry should be honest—gaming has been the number one focus of most headsets (and most VR gaming isn’t relaxing). That means that the hardware’s design is aimed at gamers and less so for other use cases, which makes headsets less user-friendly if you’re not a gamer. At the very least, the design of the Vive Flow shows a willingness to buck those foundations.