Hacker News Reader

Comment by soylentcola | Hacker News Reader

It's Treo vs PocketPC all over again! (only half joking)

I remember the back and forth comparisons and debates over price, feature set, compatibility, the companies behind them, form factor and all sorts of details. Regardless, they were some of the first "good enough" smartphones the average consumer could purchase even if their bulk and higher price kept them mostly in the realm of professionals, enthusiasts, and early adopters.

Then 5 or 6 years later we had an industry that was already becoming dominated by Apple and Google rather than Palm and Microsoft. Devices were much faster, more capable, and more accessible. Now you can buy one for $150 and get something that's actually somewhat decent.

View on HN

This time it won't matter that much which one to pick. Developers will want to support both systems. The display code needs only small changes to work for both systems (or the engine supports it already), the controllers on the other hand should be interesting. If there won't be some standard and the input and haptics diverge too much, this will hurt adoption and/or game/software sales.

The really interesting thing will be room-scale.

Oculus Rift is inherently designed for a sit-down experience with optional controllers, Vive allows room-scale experiences with controllers included. That's a pretty fundamental difference in the way your users will experience your media. Also, room-scale will essentially require a dedicated VR room free of obstacles. As such I'm guessing many Vive users will be having a sit-down experience too.

I expect that a lot of the first-gen stuff will be cockpit simulators like EVE: Valkyrie, because it's the lowest common denominator. It's in HTC's best interest to push room-scale content because that is an effective lock-in for them at this point, but that means targeting a small minority of VR users, and I think that's going to be a difficult experience to adapt for the majority userbase of sit-down users.

> Also, room-scale will essentially require a dedicated VR room free of obstacles. As such I'm guessing many Vive users will be having a sit-down experience too.

This is the part which pointed me more toward Oculus. I simply do not have the space for a dedicated VR room, so all the work done into "room scale experience" is moot for me and Oculus focus on a seated experience seems to be a better fit for me here.

The whole point of room-scale is that it is the scale of your room. We'll see how well developers manage to make that work, Hover Junkers handles it by having different sized hoverships depending on your room size.

Have you considered getting a Murphy bed? Perhaps we'll see sales of those skyrocket with people trying to make space for room scale vr.

Not so far, thanks for the idea. I had a couch/bed combination before but I couldn't stand it for daily use. Good for one or two nights, but not longer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com