So I got my HTC Vive around midday yesterday. Sadly, having to be a responsible adult to do things like feed my family I had to resist the urge to just dive in and didn't really get to start even trying to set it up until around 8:30-9:00PM. First of all, the box is freakin' huge:
(Pardon the mess)
Granted, that's the shipping box but it's roughly the size of a full tower case box.
Setup
So to be clear, I don't have my Oculus yet for comparison. I only have my Dev Kit 2 (DK2), so my comparisons between the hardware will be between the DK2 and the consumer version of the Vive. That said, even though I don't have the final version of the Oculus (yet), I can already tell that the Oculus beats that crap out of the Vive in terms of ease of setup, hands down.
Let me explain: The Vive comes with a box full of parts:
- One Head Mounted Display (HMD) with attached cables
- Two Motion Controllers with Micro USB cables for charging and firmware updates and AC adapters for each.
- Two room tracking cubes with power cables for each, and an optional sync cable connect them together if they have sync problems.
- Mounting hardware for the tracking cubes.
- One "Link Box" that sits between the HMD and the computer for the HDMI/USB connection, and an AC adapter for it.
No instructions are really provided in the box, so you have to go to HTC's site to download the setup suite. The suite will begin downloading the software necessary to run. It gives you the option of specifying your install directory (which normally isn't a big deal but in its current version Oculus Home does not, which is a source of pain for a lot of people because the install drive is also where Oculus Home downloads all of its games. Symlinks don't seem to work with either the Home software or the downloaded games, but they promised to fix this in a future version). After installing, you are guided through a series of manual setup steps to configure the room tracking, which includes placing (or more likely, mounting) the cubes so that they are sufficiently elevated and have a good visual range of the area. Then you have to run the "Room Setup", which crashed for me about a dozen times. I flipped back to Steam Tools and revalidated the files for Steam VR (Beta) and it re-downloaded 12 files. Ran again, it crashed. Then it claimed that a "controller" wasn't running that was necessary for VR to work. Then my motion controllers needed firmware updates. It was just one thing after another. Eventually, I got my Nvidia drivers updated to the version from last week (which fixed some of the issues even though no error ever told me a video driver was a problem), got the firmware updated on both of my controllers, figured out a good cable setup combination, changed the default audio device, and got all the software running.
By comparison, even though I don't have the Oculus Rift CV1, I have run through the setup for it with my DK2. Downloading Oculus Home, installing, configuring (even though I don't technically have supported hardware), and getting it going all took about 15 minutes before I was downloading my first game. I spent -hours- with the Vive tinkering, googling, etc.
The last part to actually -work- was getting the HMD to display an image. Now to be fair, because the Vive is room scale I was incentivized to run it in a room other than where my computer is located (my office). This added to some of my setup headache, as I had to get a good set of cables running as an extension and that can be tricky, especially with USB and HDMI. I already have this set up between rooms because my PC is set up to run my projector and stereo receiver in the other room, so I borrowed from those. However, the USB hub I was using wasn't sufficient so I had to take it out before I could get it to work, and I went through four sets of long HDMI cables, wall plates, and HDMI cable extenders before I found something that actually worked (25' shielded 24AWG). My wife gives me crap for keeping a computer store's worth of supplies that in her opinion I "don't need", but what I keep explaining to her about my pack-rat mentality is "there's no such thing as 'don't need', only 'don't need -yet-'". At times like this I'm glad parts of my basement look like they belong to some sort of crazy computer hoarder.
While this was a pain in the butt and the Vive seems to be a bit touchy about HDCP and signal quality, I can't blame the Vive for this over the Oculus because to be fair, I never tried to run the Oculus in another room so I don't know that I wouldn't experience the same problem had I tried.
So, two and a half hours later, I was ready to play.
Hardware:
The hardware is pretty decent. The difference between the HMDs (the consumer Vive and the DK2) is -significant-, as will (I imagine) the difference between the DK2 and the CV1 be. The FOV difference is noticeable, with the "view port" looking larger than the dev kit. Another big difference is the significantly less noticeable pixelization with the higher resolution screens (again, the CV1 will probably be comparable). Also, the lenses are much larger which seems to significantly decrease chromatic aberration around the edges. One of the problems with the earlier versions of VR headsets is that you basically had to look at everything with your head, which is somewhat unnatural. If your eyes drift away from the middle, objects become blurry, indistinct, and you experience what would have been called "color convergence problems" in the old CRT days. So look straight ahead or you don't see things clearly. Perhaps they were suspended in a xenon mist...
So yeah, much better visually. So much more clear than the previous versions. Can't wait to try out the Oculus CV1 to compare but the Vive is certainly a huge improvement over what I had.
The motion controllers work exactly as advertised. Crazy accurate tracking, decent controls. Need to try more games before I have a clear idea of their limitations but so far I've had no issues. I had a few problems with tracking when very close to the ground but that likely just means I need to adjust the room tracking cubes.
Audio is handled through ear buds and they are adequate, although I haven't found a way to adjust volume in-game yet or on the headset itself.
Room tracking seems to work perfectly. It always knew where I was and I never had any problems with jumping or teleporting.
Store:
The Steam VR experience is decent. Honestly, I prefer the Oculus Home store as being very clean and easy to use, while the Steam VR system is a bit cumbersome. This is partially because of the design of the storefront, and the fact that you are using the motion controllers like a Wii-Mote, and a few other factors. Otherwise, it's pretty good and you can get into and out of games from the Steam controllers, which you cannot do with the Oculus system (to my knowledge). The Steam overlay (or the VR version of it, rather) works from within the VR games and lets you change games which is pretty cool. Right now, the Oculus store has around 35-40 apps in it, while the VR section of Steam has over 100 listings (although many are early access or aren't even out yet, compared to the Oculus store that has about 5 early access titles and no listings for apps that are not available). The apps in the Oculus store can only be run on an Oculus (right now) but the same apps on Steam can be run on either (and are often subject to Steam sales). I was kicking myself a bit, because when I got Oculus Home I went on a crazy game buying spree and I deliberately got the Oculus Home versions because it was really easy to launch them into VR. Now, I feel a bit dumb because there were a couple of those games (Adr1ft, Windlands) that I would have liked to try on the Vive but can't unless I want to rebuy them on Steam. Some games offer codes between the two stores so if you buy one version you can get the other, but that's up to each individual developer.
Note that while Steam games are not technically "exclusive", there are a significant number of games on Steam VR that are only playable with room scale or with motion controls, so the current version of the Oculus will probably not work with a lot of these games without some 3rd party accessories (like the Sixense STEM, although to my knowledge that has yet to ship and has been plagued with production and FCC testing problems).
I'll pick up more games today and try them out. I had about $100 worth of stuff in my cart because the Steam cart crashed but I'll try again later today.
Experience:
This is exactly as advertised. Room tracking, touch controllers, and a great HMD. I doubt anyone will be unhappy with their purchase if they get this, but that doesn't mean the Oculus won't also be very good. This feels like a consumer ready product, for certain. The revised "stiff" headset straps make the headset sit on your face/head pretty comfortably. It even comes with a spare headset/face contact seal for people with "narrow faces" (which I do not have). The weight might get to some people after a while, but I had no issues with it playing standing over an hour. I only stopped because it was midnight and this was somewhat intense, and I decided that I needed to wind down so I went to my couch and fired up the Xbox. It's saying something when your relative "winding down" activity is playing Quantum Break on an 80" screen.
Conclusion (so far):
This is a great device. I need to try out more games to really get a feel for it, but I'm not disappointed at all. This is some solid hardware, and while the setup might be a bit of a pain it'll be worth it in the end. I did have to strap the headset to my head pretty tight so that I could look straight down without it starting to move around on my face (and the image to get blurry as a result). There's an IPD knob (interpupilary distance) which is basically like a manual focus, but the software didn't offer any tutorial on how to get the best result with it that I noticed. Room scale works great, and while my space is limited (working with about 12 feet by 8-9 feet) I had a decent degree of movement freedom, although I would have benefited from a larger area because I was close to a "boundary wall" within VR most of the places that I was standing and that was a little distracting at times.
This is actually going to come off like a crazy statement, but I'm actually -glad- that I got both the Oculus and the Vive because honestly, I think I'll be using them for different apps/experiences. Because of the room mounting, taking the Vive from place to place is very impractical. I have two main locations where I'd like to do VR, one is my office/cockpit and the other is a room space. There's no easy way to bring the Vive back and forth between those locations, so I had to choose and since the Vive's big advantage is room based VR, not confining it to my office/cockpit was an easy choice. However, having a second consumer-quality VR headset that I can use for flight/driving sims that doesn't rely on room trackers is ideal as well, just for different games.
More to come.
-Byshop
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