It's well known that the Vive has been sweeping the stage with it's latest prototype. It comes with two Wii remote / steam controller hybrids
and a head mounted display.
It also has lighthouse; a tracking system built for accuracy and low latency, with sub-millimeter precision, and it is said to give presence unlike the VR community has experienced prior.
Due to this, combined with the 90hrtz refresh rate and two 1080 by 1200 pixel screens. The demo's are immersive; you feel like your there, they feel solid. And what's more Gabe Newell; CEO of Valve quotes: “zero percent of people get motion sick”. Now I think that's a bold statement and I'm going to go over that in just a second, but valve has also given the stats to there current prototype and promised a developer kit release in spring and a consumer version available by the end of 2015. You can now apply for a free developer kit here: Signup. So that's more info than Oculus has cared to share, and it's clear to see that the Vive has taken the lead in this VR space race. So I would like to point out some of issues that have gone unnoticed.
Let's start with the release date: a Developer kits ship this spring, that’s awesome. If they can throw a Developer kit together by spring then go for it, I don't doubt Valves ability to make this product a real deal. But the scary part is when they say a consumer edition comes out by the end of this year. That's soon. That's like planning to make a final product the day after you finish your prototype. It's evident they have competition that might be pushing them toward a 2015 release but the choice might come back to bite them if they don’t have any games to play when it comes out. Oculus's Development Kit has been out for about a year now and the first Development Kit gave people time to experiment with the medium, make first person Flappy Bird and stuff. This paid off because Oculus has over 700 games on the share store.
So what content will the headset get. Not much if valve wants to keep the Vive a motion sick free experience. I emphasize that the next few problems are only valid if the Vive decides to be a 100% free motion sick experience. Valve has given no promises to for there consumer version to do this; Gabe only quotes their current prototype allows “zero percent of people get motion sick”. What they've done already is make the Vive is a 360 degree room scale experience. What this means is that people walk around in the real world, to move there character.
The way motion sickness works is you feel motion but don't see it, or you see motion and don't feel. So when you use a thumb stick on your Xbox controller, you see everything move forward, but you don't feel it.
The way to completely avoid motion sickness is to do all the movement yourself. The lighthouse tracking system only tracks in a maximum 15 by 15 foot space. So this means no games larger than 15 by 15 feet. If you try to saunter past that point you will hit a real wall. But guess what. You also cant put anything IN that space:
Imagine your in a virtual reality kitchen and there's one of those island kitchen tables in the middle of the room. Now you accidentally walk through where the table should be in real life. Your characters view would stop, because his avatar can't go through the table, but you would feel like you were moving and then blaaaaarghh. And vise versa too, if you bumped into real world objects like couches and tables you wouldn't be able to play the game because there would be a table in the way.
O.K. time travel to 2016. The Vive is out, consumer. There's not many games because of the speedy release but that's O.K. You sold all your furniture and cleared your living room to become a VR room. You go to the store and see the Vive cost's $500! HTC's Exec director of global marketing said there would be a "slightly higher price point" to deliver a "premium experience."
The Oculus Rift consumer version is expected to cost between $200 to $400, so the Vive should be priced $300 to $500.
So you go home take all the money you got from selling your furniture and buy it. You bring it home plug it into your laptop and... the game is playing at 10 frames a second! Your 2014 laptop won't cut it. The Vive has a total resolution of 2160 by 1200 pixels. With both screens that running at 90Hz, it's likely that Steam Machines will be built from the ground up to handle the Vive. Price points for steam machines go up to 5 thousand dollars. So pay 5000 for a PC, 500 for the tracker controller and headset and however much for a game. Get a room to play in. Play your small game collection of 15' games.
