'We want you to bring Vive into your home and not change the way you live'
A large part of the Vive experience - and one that sets it apart from competitors right now - is its room-scaling technology, Lighthouse, which will let you walk about while wearing the Vive. McRee tells us that the technology has "matured quite a bit" over the last few months.
"For instance, we had issues in the beginning with reflective surfaces and things like that. Our goal is to make sure that when you get Vive, whatever time that is, that you can introduce it in your home without changing the way you live to have it.
"You don't want to have to say 'Ok we have to take these lamps out' and 'We have to do this'."
From power efficiency to the way it interacts with lights and even cats, Valve and HTC have been working to make room-scaling better and better. In October, Valve posted a questionnaire asking people how people will be using virtual reality in their homes.
Living room or bedroom? How many square feet will they have to play with? These are the things HTC and Valve need to know if Vive is going to adapt to us and not the other way around.
Then there's virtual reality's biggest demon, nausea, but HTC is adamant that it's solved the problem. "I'm confident we're now at the time where we can provide a very very good experience with minimal to no latency and an extremely high frame rate," says McRee.
"It's not just us. It's the graphics card manufacturers, it's the power supply that provides consistent power, it's the Lighthouses being plugged into a wall socket that doesnt have any congestion in it. It's all those things working in symphony."
But what about when I want to play a game for an extended period of time? Can I plug in for a two-hour marathon and expect to feel fine afterwards? "That's going to be a challenge but we're working through that quickly," he tells us.
"We're doing a lot of studies trying to figure out what that looks like for extended use of VR and Vive and making sure we provide guidelines for that, but currently we haven't seen any problems with long-term usage."
'We're in no way the experts'
HTC still won't comment on price, but we'll tell you now that it's not going to be cheap. "We're focused on quality of experience more so than accessibility and so it's important to us we get a very good experience," says McRee.
"Whether that means the price is impacted or whether that means the minimum spec is impacted, its not going to be a decision we take lightly. That's not to say if we release the minimum spec of one thing it won't work on lesser graphics cards, but that's what we consider comfortable. It may not be accessible for everybody. Nothing is ever accessible for everybody."
After floundering for several years - despite a reputation for design excellence - HTC knows it needs to look beyond smartphones if it wants to turn around its fortunes and grow. As for Valve, the go-to-market opportunity with Steam already in place is phenomenally big. The question is: why wouldn't the two partner up?
Even with that said, it would be remiss to say this isn't a risk for HTC. Many of us have been wowed by virtual reality, but whether there's a massive market potential is still not certain. In order to let virtual reality flourish, HTC and Valve are just providing the tools and letting the developers shape history.
"We're in no way the experts," says McRee. "What is the next big thing going to be? What are the next two, three big things? We don't know. So we're trying not to be prescriptive to our developers. We want the developers to do whatever they feel like they need to do."
Virtual reality can be an incredible thing, but HTC and Valve know that, for VR hit to with impact, everything needs to be in symphony.
"You only have one first time with VR and you can never get that back."
