We've seen many experimental headsets moving away from the PC or the smartphone, but The Vive Standalone is the first commercial product of this type from a big company that's been formally announced. Qualcomm is the new partner coming on board to the HTC-Valve team, providing its powerful chip Snapdragon 835.
The Vive Standalone is a self-contained virtual reality headset, without any cables. It includes support from Qualcomm's inside-out positional tracking technology and a set of cameras that allows you to walk, not just look around. It runs HTC's Viveport platform, but we still don't know if every app and game will be compatible or how it would manage those that require a high-end PC.
We're also still waiting for the specs, although we do have some dark images showing an apparently light and plain headset. The bad news is that The Vive Standalone has only been announced as exclusive to the Chinese market later this year. Maybe it's not that different to the HTC Google Daydream with WorldSense tecnology announced in May, but without the Google support to avoid legal problems in the Chinese market.
Could this be the future of VR?