Been full aboard the VR train for 3 years now, I do full time VR development and have used practically every piece of VR tech out there, including Oculus Rift CV1, PSVR, and the Vive Pre. Wednesday, my Vive consumer version arrived, and for the first time I was able to play with it in the comfort of my own home, in privacy, for as long as I want. Let me first qualify my statement by saying that I think headset-only VR like the Oculus Rift CV1 is pretty awe inspiring, but not nearly in the same way the Vive is. I liken trying the Oculus Rift to the uncanny valley - the closer you get to being "inside" the game, the more you notice the disconnect between areas of the tech that aren't quite up to par. The first time you try an Oculus Rift DK1, you think it's amazing that it looks like you're in the game, but you quickly realize how much you miss the ability to lean around. The first time you try the DK2, with it's ability to track your position from sitting down, you regain the ability to lean but then you suddenly miss your hands. So you grab a pair of razer hydras to track your hands, but that only highlights how much you miss the ability to track your position when not facing the camera (i.e. 360 degree space), how much the wires from the hydra bother you, how much you miss your feet, and so forth. The Vive, I feel, is the first piece of VR consumer technology that gets everything "good enough" that you don't have any immediate short comings spring to mind that takes you out of the game. To be sure, there is room for massive improvement in virtually every aspect of the headset, but there is nothing really missing that I consider a deal breaker. It all begins with the Vive's method of positional tracking, which is flat out amazing. I've never used a tracking technology so precise - my entire room is tracked and, try as I might, I can't make any of my VR objects - either headset or controller - lose tracking. The ability to actually walk around my room, and for the VR tech to compensate, is revolutionary. It's so incredibly hard to explain what it's like without letting someone try it. The best comparison I can give is that it feels what everyone assumed the Wiimote or Kinect would be like, but failed to deliver. The biggest change over the wiimote is the feeling of proprioception in your hands. Proprioception is a subconscious area of our cognition that allows us to know where our body parts are in relation to each other without visual confirmation. What this means, in layman's terms, is that we use proprioception to know where our hands are without looking at them. This area of the brain is one of the first areas affected by alcohol, which is why part of the sobriety test is for people to lean back and touch their fingers to their nose while their eyes are closed. Proprioception is localized only - outside of relative constraints of the body, we lose proprioception. This is where the wiimote faltered. The wiimote proposition was more like "When I move my hands this way, this guy across the room moves his hands in the same way, which is cool!" Lost in that is where the guy's hands across the room were in relation to his body. The Vive's proposition is more like "I am the guy, his hands are my hands." This manifests in things like Audioshield, which is sort of like a VR version of elite beat agents. Where EBA was confined to a 2D screen, Audioshield takes place in 3D - the notes don't only come left and right and up and down, but also along the Z axis. And not just in front of you, but also above and below you. It would be essentially impossible to play the game without proprioception. Because the game is in VR, it feels like a dream to play. You don't spend any time thinking about controls, it's as intuitive as can possibly be. It's a rather interesting phenomenon that, no matter how old or young the player of Audioshield is, I don't have to explain the controls beyond "touch the dots." the failure of kinect was, of course, the imprecise control. The Vive has the most precise positional tracking I've ever used. When I walk around the room, I feel like I am there. The best example of how precise and cool the positional tracking controls are came from Vanishing Realms, which is a bit like Zelda in VR. The first time you get your sword, you are dumped into a room with a skeleton warrior coming at you. you have no weapon to attack him with, and behind him is the alter with your sword. So he's coming at me in VR and I'm sort of panicking trying to figure out how to get aorund him. He winds up his sword and swings it at me, and I duck in real life; to my astonishment I actually dodge his sword swing in VR as well. As the sword passes above my head, I, in real life, step forward beside him, pivot around, dash forward and grab the sword, then turn around and lunge forward to strike him behind the back. He reels in pain, turns around, and swings his sword at me. I parry his sword swing with my sword, pushing it down and to my left, which exposes his ribs. From there, I pull back and swing through his rib, shattering him in two, and killing him in the process. In the course of the action, I have walked and lept and dodged all around my room. In retrospect, the entire encounter was astonishing - I didn't press a single button. None of what I did was a canned animation. Everything I described and did, I actually did. It was me doing those tasks. The game has no set defined "dodge" mechanism, there is no "duck" button. It doesn't do anything beyond define a shape (the skeleton's sword) that is a hit box, and give my own head (through the position of my headset) it's own hit box. I dodge by simply making sure my head isn't in the way of his swing. I parry his sword attack by making sure my sword's hitbox is in the way of his sword's hitbox. This level of interaction is what Kinect promised and failed to deliver, but it's here in the Vive. This vanishing abstraction between on-screen action and real life pantomiming is precisely why the Vive is so amazing. My father is 65 years old. He stopped playing video games when the Sega Genesis came along because 3 buttons was too complex for him. Hand him a modern Xbox controller and the 15 buttons and 2 analog sticks are just too much for him. As a result, he's basically never played a first person shooter before, or something like Metal Gear Solid, or uncharted, or any of that stuff, because the controls are too abstract for him. Yet I put him in Budget Cuts, a VR FPS stealth title, and he was able to pick it up with breeze. Being able to tell my dad, "hide behind that wall" and have him instantly know how to do it -- by bending over and physically hiding behind that wall, rather than mapping that to a button press -- that is so cool. He put on the VR headset to try budget cuts "just for a few minutes." When he was done, he asked how long he had played, expecting that he had been in VR for like maybe 20 minutes. He had actually been playing for 4 and a half hours. Time melts in VR. I could keep going on and on, but suffice to say the HTC Vive has surpassed my lofty expectations. Even if you've tried VR in the past, you haven't tried it like the vive presents it. It feels as big of a shift in computing as the move from 2D to 3D was. It's the real deal. I wish I could show everyone this tech, because it's the neatest thing I've ever tried. Gamestop and the Microsoft Store have both announced they will begin selling and demoing the HTC vive in person in the next few weeks - I urge everyone who can to try it out and be amazed. It'll be an experience that sticks with you for a long time to come.
You just put into words all of the reasons why the I think the Vive is the most amazing piece of technology I've ever seen, good job.
Man, I thought you are promoting the product as your description is like a sales talk.... got me on my guard.
This is 2016, posts this long get ignored. lol Like you're telling us you actually read the whole thing?
I honestly have no interest in full body VR or anything unseated in homes. The amount of people who can afford to dedicate the space is far and in between anyway. Personally, I just want basically a 3DS strapped to my face with none of it's issues. I can learn to do the head tracking stuff. But full body? Nope to the nope'd I'm sure there's a market for that though and the tech is impressive. So i'm sure it will be successful enough to carve out it's own consistent niche.
Lol well on the one hand, my full time day job is in vr, so I am invested in the technology. But I dont work for valve or anything. I am just seriously taken by this particular headset. My post is my honest impressions.
Remember when sites like Engadget wrote reviews like this? (May be my imagination, could be they never did.) Now they publish this: http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/08/oculus-rift-vs-htc-vive/
I got drunk and preordered one months ago. Think my shipdate is may. Apparently the box is hella huge so theres no way I can keep it a secret from my family lol. -doulomb
I'm interested in VR. Too bad it's too expensive for me. =( Maybe when VR get cheaper or it replaces monitors altogether......
