My HTC Vive shows up on Wednesday. No word on the Oculus yet.

I just got the email confirmation today and the shipping date is scheduled for two days from now. Thankfully I'm working from home this week so I'll be around to sign for it (which is required). I have no idea where I'm going to set it up at the moment, but I'm sure I'll figure something out. To my surprise, I got this confirmation -before- the shipping confirmation for my Oculus which I reserved months earlier. In both cases, I got in on the first shipment wave and placed my order within minutes of the site going live. Technically, they both were only scheduled for an "April" timeframe so neither is late at this point, but I assumed the one I ordered first would have been the one that would have shown up first but I suppose in retrospect that doesn't necessarily make sense. I did get my email from Oculus apologizing for the delays and that I would get another email sometime between a few days ago and next Tuesday.

So, it arrives on Wednesday and I'll keep you guys posted with impressions once I get it all set up.

Has anyone else on here ordered either and have you gotten your shipping confirmation yet?

-Byshop

Congrats !

Looking forward to your impressions.

As for me, nah i haven't , i can't afford it tbh.

Nice, looking forward to impressions.

Ordered mine about a week ago, no email yet and I don't expect one for a while. Mid May or June I suspect is when I'll be getting mine. I have work to do before it arrives anyway. Got to get rid of my couch, sell shit, and make space.

I got time.

I look forward to your impressions and more so your comparisons when you have both. I am particularly interested in how Project Cars feels in VR. I am curious if you are getting any simulator sickness. Racing games are the main reason I want VR and I need to know that I am going to be comfortable for long sessions.

I'm curious as well. Traditionally I've been playing racing games using Eyefinity/Nvidia Surround with head tracking (Track IR5) or even without headtracking. I have a racing cockpit and a Logitech G27 to go along with it.

-Byshop

It'd be cool if it slightly changed the in game model according to your wheel setup so if you look down, the pedals in game are the same place as they really are (even though it might differ from the actual car).

No such luck for me paid in full by paypal over 30 days ago and was in wave one of the preorders (4mins) in the uk its now the 5th and im still waiting for shipping info, it seems every other person in the uk that bought one is too :(

Soon.....soon......

I actually kind of had that effect now. I have a DK2 and Elite Dangerous as well as a Saitek X52 Pro (which is what the flightstick and throttle look exactly like in Elite Dangerous. I positioned the stick and throttle in the same positions in my cockpit as they appear in the game, and when playing in VR it's a very odd effect to look down and see hands that are not my own but where I expect my hands to be and moving in sync with my own hands. Very odd effect.

That sucks, man. For some additional context I'm located in the central United States.

-Byshop

@Byshop are you a secret millionaire or just very enthusiastic about VR since you got both? :D

Seriously, though, I haven't preordered as I'm very sceptic about which one will win the race or at least prove the more capable of the two right now. But also because MS' HoloLense seems pretty cool and I don't know if that might not perhaps fit my needs better.

I'm no millionaire, but I turn 40 this year and I'm well established in my chosen career as an IT Engineering consultant so the extra cash to cover a few expenses like these isn't that hard to manage. My company also gives me 2k a year to spend on my own computer/gadgets as a "perk" so I used a chunk of that for the Oculus. I'm technically only out of pocket for the Vive, and by the time the PSVR shows up my budget will have renewed (I preordered that as well) so that doesn't come directly out of my pocket either.

However, there's a limit on what I'm willing to spend on a gadget that I have no real practical use for, and the Hololense exceeds that by a pretty wide margin (as did Google Glass). The Hololense might end up being something pretty cool, but there's no way in hell I'm going to drop 3k for a dev kit on something that I have no real practical use for and that has virtually no app support. I'll likely get Hololense eventually but not now in its current state (and for that price).

-Byshop

@Byshop: Yeah, I know what you mean, I'm 41, have a good job, no kids, (DINK, baby!) and well, if I really wanted to, I would not have a problem affording all of them. But like you I've got monetary pain threshold for just how high I'll go for something and given that VR is still somewhat pricy and that I may or may not even use them, I'm holding out to see what will happen.

The Hololense might end up being something pretty cool, but there's no way in hell I'm going to drop 3k for a dev kit on something that I have no real practical use for and that has virtually no app support.

That's insane! I had no idea it cost that much, what are they thinking? I would have to assume they are looking to distance the HoloLense from the rest of the VR by making it seem more business/practial appliance oriented but still, they need people to be able to buy it in order to develop for it. Well, let's see what next year brings.

To be fair, that's the price of a Hololense dev kit. While the Oculus Dev Kit turned out to be way cheaper than the consumer product, dev kits tend to usually be much more expensive than the normal retail version of something. The retail release of the Hololense has been deliberately delayed by Microsoft until they have a decent number of real apps under their belt, and I suspect that the consumer version of the device will be far less than that 3k you'd have to spend right now for a dev kit.

-Byshop

@Byshop: Yeah, that was what I was comparing it to, the Oculus dev kit, which my indie game dev mates bought back in the day at a very reasonable price. And I recently found out that the Vive had free dev kits so why Microsoft has priced the HoloLens so much higher is a bit of wonder to me - unless, ofc, it is as I said to distance themselves from the notion of strictly being a gaming accessory.

The stress is over! i just got my shipping confirmation and its one day shipping to the UK so i get it tomorrow the same day as you :D

Happy days

Well, dev kits that cost more than the device itself are actually more common than the other way around (and to get a free dev kit from Vive you kind of had to be a "legit" game dev and not a guy with Visual Studio installed on his home computer like me). Console dev going back to the PS2/Xbox days were at least double the price of the normal consoles. The Hololense dev kit is crazy expensive right now, but unlike the VR headsets currently on the market it's an entire platform. There's a full PC built into the unit, and you don't need a computer to run it.

Even factoring that in, the price is still way high to me as a private consumer (although I'm sure my company has one in our innovation lab by now) but to a company looking to do some legit app creation it's not a significant chunk of change. I expect the price will come down a lot by the time this thing is closer to being ready for prime time, but that's still probably close to a year off.

@naz99: Great news, man! Congrats!

@BassMan: I tried Project Cars last night. I didn't go through all the effort of mounting the wheel but I tried it out using my 360 controller. It's pretty cool in VR. The scale felt a bit weird to me, but that might have been the claustrophobic nature of some of the high end race car cockpits. When I tried an Audi it didn't feel quite so cramped. The sense of depth in that game is -very- strong, so much so that when driving behind other cars and looking at them through them back windshields, the seats and driver in the cars felt further away then the rear bumper. Each car felt like a very real 3D object in relative 3D space.

I would not say that VR makes you better at the game the way a good Force Feedback steering wheel does (nor am I of the opinion that head tracking in general is a "must have" in racing games) but it certainly makes the experience very fun. I look forward to trying it again once my consumer headsets start arriving, though.

-Byshop

Vive looks way more impressive but its also a much bigger hassle

@Byshop: Thanks for the PCars update. How much time did you spend with it? Did you feel ill in any way?

Yeah, it seems that way (if you want to do standing, room tracking experiences at least). I'm still trying to figure out how the heck I'm going to set it up with my space. I have a house with rooms and not a big studio apartment.

-Byshop

I just ran a few races last night before heading to bed so not a significant amount of time. So far the only games that have really gotten me at all are Adr1ft and Windlands but even then that's tolerable. Other than that, I've spent hours playing various games like Technolust and Ethan Carter with no issue.

-Byshop

@Byshop: I have the Rift, Vive and PSVR preordered. I won't get the Vive until May, Rift in June and PSVR when it launches. After watching the Giant Bomb coverage I may pass on the Rift though. How big is your space? My home office, where my PC is, has about 8 1/2' X 7' of open space. If that's not enough I may move everything in the living room where I have tons of space. I'm curious to see how big your room is and how it works there.

It's interesting watching Steams store front turn into a Kinect 2.0 marketplace. Hopefully the games get more advanced because as of right now I'm not exactly impressed.

My room is a reasonable size, but it's full of stuff. Obutto R3volution cockpit, an L-shaped 70 or 80" desk, a file cabinet, a second smaller desk for the 3D printer...

In my current setup, I have my main gaming PC in my office hooked up to that cockpit (three monitors), one DVI port converted to HDMI for the Oculus, and the last HDMI port (five video ports in total) running through a storage room in the center of my basement to the "main room" where it's hooked up to a receiver that then goes to an HDMI projector. I also have a USB 2.0 over CAT5 extender so I can plug devices into that computer in that room (although I mostly use wireless). I'm hoping that I can do the same thing with the Vive, and based on the specs it looks promising (one HMDI and one USB2.0 seems reasonable). I don't want to move my computer, but I'll do what I can to extend the Vive so that it can be used from another physical space.

-Byshop

I am expecting mine Thurday. I am in wave 1 and ordered with Paypal 16 mins after the preorders went live but I havent received a shipping order yet.

Well, Oculus has about 30-35 titles in their store right now. If you go to Steam and use the new HTC Vive flag they added, the total number of titles that comes back is around 130 (although some of them are listings for games that aren't out yet). There's overlap between those lists, and many of those games on Steam that aren't on the Oculus store work just fine with the Oculus (literally every one that I've tried so far).

Of course, a ton of them are just simple "VR Experiences" or games that aren't terribly deep but are designed to showcase VR, but there are some legitimate titles in there as well that work with VR. Project Cars, Dirt Rally, Elite Dangerous, Ethan Carter, the DCS flight simulator platform, Surgeon Simulator, are all either AAA quality or high end indie games that have done well even prior to VR support being added.

Eve Valkyrie is a VR exclusive, but having spent a lot of time with the alpha/beta versions of the game I can say that it's -really- solid (if you like multiplayer 3d space combat sims). This one is why I'm impatient for my Oculus, since it's a full priced game that I'll get for free once it arrives.

But even for the VR exclusive games that are built just to showcase VR, I'm actually having a lot of fun with those as well. Windlands is EA but once you get the hang of swinging from tree to tree it's really fun (if a bit nauseating). Some of the other "jetpack" type games are simple but fun, and the horror games like Affected or Dreadhalls are AWESOME. Dreadhalls is a great example of what VR can do, because the game itself is about as simple as a horror game can get but when you couple it with VR it becomes amazingly intense. It's one thing for something to suddenly show up on a computer screen when you turn around, but it's quite another when you turn around and there's something standing so close to you that it feels like you can touch it (or that it can touch you). It's unnerving in a fashion that's really hard to describe.

-Byshop

With the Vive it seems like you only get the shipping notification the day it ships, so a day or two before you actually get the product (depending on where you live) so that seems plausible. Oculus is sending out email and email letting us know where they are in terms of getting up to that point.

-Byshop

It would seem Eve Valkyrie is coming to the Rift pretty soon.

https://twitter.com/EVEValkyrie/status/717352059171971072

It came out on the 28th, but I get it for free when my Oculus arrives (it was a pre-order bonus). Since it's a full priced title on the Oculus Store ($60) I'd rather not waste the money by buying a game that I'll eventually get for free. Unfortunately, this means that even though I'm technically capable of playing it now, I have to wait until my real Oculus order actually shows up (and at this point I don't know when that's going to be).

-Byshop

I keep forgetting its one of the bundled titles, 1st world problems eh? :P

At least you will have time to give one headset a proper test before the other turns up.

Yeah, pretty low down on the list of life's real problems but for the context of VR discussion it's my current greatest annoyance. I played the earlier versions, and it has a CoD-like progression system so it'll suck being weeks to a month behind other players who got their units earlier by the time I get in.

-Byshop

My current greatest annoyance is that there are tons of VR games on steam i want to buy and i cant afford any of them for the next couple of weeks :P

bought a £750 headset and cant afford even inde games to play on it :/

At least the wait is over its been unbearable :)