A Week of Room-Scale Virtual Reality with the HTC Vive

Jos

Posts: 3,073   +97
Staff

Valve and HTC’s Vive is the most immediately impressive (and imposing) VR headset on the market. It comes with a price to match: $800. For comparison’s sake, the Oculus Rift is $600, though it will get touch controllers later this year that will probably bring it a lot closer to the Vive in terms of price and functionality. And of course, the Vive’s $800 price tag doesn’t include the powerful gaming PC required to operate it.

Once you’ve got the Vive headset, room sensors, and remote-shaped controllers synced and working, you can walk through a virtual space with your own legs and grab things with your own “hands.” That’s the key differentiator here: while the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR have so far been largely focused on seated experiences, Vive is more focused on standing, walking, grabbing, and bopping.

For the past five days, I’ve spent nearly as much time in virtual reality as real reality. With the Vive set up in my living room, I’ve been everywhere from outer space to Aperture Science’s stark white labs to a quiet beach where I just sat on the ground and listened to the waves. Like, I actually sat on the ground. With my own butt.

Read the complete article.

 
I hope you also do a demo with adequate room space too (as a comparison).
I have also used the Vive in a confined space and an open space. Found that things were more janky in the smaller space (yes, obvious), but if you have the room, it really helps with the tracking and not losing the controllers.
 
#1 THE BIGGEST PROBLEM is the COST.

Not only do you need a powerful, gaming-spec'd computer to play with the VR headsets on a computer - wherein most Americans bought their cheapass computers at Walmart and lack Video Accelerators powerful enough. These headsets will only appeal to a narrow range of PC Gamers - not to mention PC Gamers with $500+ to spend on a pair of video game goggles.

#2 MOTION SICKNESS - I don't need to belabor this point because ALL of the reviewers posting reviews are saying the same thing. The Human Brain adapts sound and vision to balance and predicting balance. Blocking sound and vision completely confuses the brain. Showing the brain a FPS of movement when it can't feel movement confuses the brain.

#3 THIRD PARTY SUPPORT and FIRST PARTY SUPPORT.
Chances are there will be very limited 1st party support.
Third party support means that now: every game developer will need to adapt their games to Oculus Rift.
Which brings up the 4th problem:

THERE IS NO STANDARD.
Oculus, Vive, PS4VR... Every single one of these headsets has a different design and uses different proprietary means to function.

BIG MISTAKE.

Bluetooth succeeded because there is a singe dominating standard which all manufacturers can understand the limitations and abilities of - allowing them to all design products that are similar in basic operation yet may include more advanced features to pile onto the baseline.
Klipsch, LG, Samsung, Sony...anyone can make a Bluetooth headset.
Without STANDARDS for VR there are a bunch of companies just throwing things at you trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Problem is: HUMAN HEARING is more standardized than HUMAN EYESIGHT. some people get epileptic seizures from Dance Dance Revolution for Godssakes.
My idea of VR isn't sitting in a chair with a headset over my eyes and ears.
My idea of VR is:
 
The one thing that I want to know about these VR headsets is if you can do other things, such as watch videos, use regular Windows, play GTA, or is it like a console, where you can only use it to play games made for it?

AND NO, I do not mean use Windows in virtual reality, or interact with videos in virtual reality, I mean simply just view as you would a monitor.

Edit: Never mind, read the whole article. I kept wondering because after reading about coccus, it felt that the focus of these things was going to be all about games made for them. Which would be a waste of money if you don't get to play much.
 
Last edited:
Nice review, thanks for sharing. The VR mini golf is the craziest crazy golf I've ever seen :)
 
Back