HTC Vive Headset Nearing 100,000 Sales | Hacker News Reader

HTC Vive Headset Nearing 100,000 Sales

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383 pointslxm250 comments

I said this in another thread, but if you haven't tried the Vive (or maybe Oculus with the Touch controllers, which are not generally available yet), then you haven't really tried VR.

Wearing a stereoscopic headset is one thing, but the presence that room-scale brings is just another thing altogether. I had tried Oculus demos at conferences and such, and I kinda started to think maybe VR was over-hyped.

Then I got my Vive on pre-order, put it on and went into the tutorial. There was a part where you can inflate balloons coming out of your perfectly-tracked controllers. I instinctively bonked one with a controller, and I FELT it (thanks to haptic feedback from the controller and diagetic sound). I basically forgot I was wearing a headset for the rest of the tutorial, I was present.

That's when it really clicked for me that this is happening this time. This is something new. I'm 100% convinced VR is the new medium going forward.

I actually was completely convinced when I tried my friend's Rift. That being said, I bought a Vive for my house and I do agree that it is another step beyond the Rift.

> it is another step beyond the Rift.

Literally. I can't imagine how they're still justifying the Rift at this point. Is the room scale tracking somehow inferior when you sit in a chair?

> Is the room scale tracking somehow inferior when you sit in a chair?

Nope. The Rift is definitely more comfortable for most people and looks more like a finished product, but that's about all the good I can say about it. I used a Rift demo station about a week before my Vive arrived and it immediately made me happy about my choices. Roomscale is huge and while Oculus technically can be used that way the official support is still largely based around forward facing.

Things will change when Oculus Touch comes out. I don't understand why people are already dismissing the Rift as if it's the final revision, especially in such an immature market such as VR.

Oculus is still more focused on non-roomscale experiences for now, but they're already starting to change how they talk about it, no doubt in preparation for Touch. The tech is there, the games are there (from Vive-land), the only thing really missing right now are the controllers.

Oculus' tech is excellent. That is not disputed. But their management is hot garbage. And if anything can kill an excellent product, it's poor management. HTC and Valve have been much better stewards of the Vive than Facebook and Oculus have been of the Rift.

Oculus has burnt a lot of good will in the developer and consumer communities, with the delays, the shady exclusivity deals, the walled garden app store, the broken promises on open source and Linux and OS X support, etc.

Yup, I got my dk2 and then they dropped Mac and Linux support in the next version - what a waste.

Well, as a Mac fan, it unfortunately made sense. Aside from the top of the line Macs PRO, Apple doesn't sell machines good enough to support VR.

I have money, and I love mac, but I won't be buying Mac Pro for $3k just to play with the tech.

Even the top of the line Mac Pro is not good enough. I've used it with the DK2 in Windows, and judder was still a huge problem.

No, that computer is good enough. It's the devs making the app you played that are not.

Oculus is playing a game with their specs. On one hand, it makes their peripheral look like really cutting edge technology if it can only run on the latest and greatest hardware. And on the other, it keeps them from having to try to fulfill even more orders over what they have already proven they cannot handle.

Simple graphics + room scale VR is an amazing experience. AAA games need whizbang graphics features to be able to compete with each other because they haven't had any new gameplay features to show off in nearly 15 years. But a lot of this effects are unnecessary in VR--sometimes even a bad idea! Normal mapping, for example, is has been reliably shown to cause motion sickness in people with a relatively high ratio of estrogen to testosterone (not just women, but men with hormonal imbalances. Women with high testosterone seem to do fine).

I think Valve and Oculus understand that AAA game studios don't have a lot to offer to VR. You're not going to really adapt Call of Duty to the Vive. So they are banking on the huge cadre of indie developers to rapidly make the first content for them. And that is going to mostly be fairly new devs using Unity, not really understanding what they are doing other than following tutorials. Optimisation is not exactly a strong point.

Do you have a source on the testosterone information? That seems really interesting to me and something I haven't heard yet.

This study went into some of the changes in depth perception experienced by people going through hormonal therapy for gender reassignment operations: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10341369

This paper talks about some observations and some of the issues that still need to be covered: http://www.danah.org/papers/transtech.pdf

And a further paper from Dr. Boyd going into more detail on virtual reality more specifically: http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf

Good enough for what? I used the first build of WebVR with my DK2 on 2013 Macbook Pro and tried a simple Quake level viewer. Sure, no AAA graphics but it worked, and well!

The new drivers removed my ability to experiment with WebVR. I could no longer use the hardware not due to limitations with my computer, but limitations imposed for marketing purposes.

That's an excellent point. It's a shame that Apple doesn't make either of (a) good computers or (b) moddable computers anymore.

Meanwhile, I've got a Windows PC that I've thrown together over the years, I just put a new SSD in it, and I'm waiting on buying either a new RX 480 or 1080, and I've got a 3D-capable PC, more capable and also much cheaper than the $3K Mac.

I think a lot of people want the Oculus to fail, because it's Valve vs Facebook. Valve is generally loved, Facebook is generally disliked. Had Palmer not sold to FB, I think they would have much stronger support and it would be a very different story. People were behind team Palmer+Carmack until they used the kickstarter dollars to "sell out." Oculus definitely didn't help their standing in the community once they started trying to buy exclusives and add DRM.

Kind of reminds me of the Makerbot fiasco. Like Makerbot, Oculus has lost much of the early adopter community, but if they can hang on long enough, they can capture the mainstream adoption wave and it might not matter.

Had Oculus not sold to FB, they would have kept working with Valve and there wouldn't be a Vive. https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/18/htc-vive-an-oral-history...

Good. More competition = better.

The relevant bits:

"Valve's work up to 2013 had made real-time tracking in VR a viable proposition. But although it had worked out the fundamentals, it wasn't about to build its own headset. And why would it? The public had already voted with its wallet, funding Oculus to the tune of $2.4 million. In Jan. 2014 Valve announced that it would collaborate with Oculus on tracking to "drive PC VR forward." It also said it had no plans to release its own VR hardware, although it noted that "this could change" in the future.

It's clear that at some point Oculus and Valve's cooperative spirit fell apart. It could be that Oculus and Valve disagreed on what VR should be: The Rift and Vive certainly offer different experiences. But it's also been suggested that communication from Oculus ground to a halt in the months after the Facebook acquisition, which forced Valve to explore other paths. It's unlikely that anyone will go on the record to confirm that for years. All we know is that in early January, Luckey was reportedly calling Valve's tech "the best virtual reality demo in the world," and by late spring, HTC and Valve were meeting to hammer out a deal."

Because objectively, the Rift, in its current form, is vastly inferior to the Vive with Lighthouse touch controllers.

Even if the Rift's touch controllers are released later and are superior, they'd be hard pressed to be much more superior.

Hey Chris, long time no see!

Yeah I basically agree with you, I just don't see it as a much of problem for Oculus in the long term given how early all this is.

It does room scale just fine with the touch, by all accounts. I've used the vive and own a rift. I'm pretty happy with it. The display in the rift is better and it's more comfortable.

Thats a pretty good way to put it. It's like the difference between a slightly better display and being in another world

I own DK1, DK2, Vive and tried Rift CV1 at a Best Buy. Was not impressed by the tracking on the Rift CV1. Perhaps it was the demo or demo environment, but it didn't feel as smooth. It definitely 'cut out' a few times, albeit very briefly. Have you experienced that at home?

As someone who wears glasses, I actually have the opposite experience. The Vive accommodates the glasses pretty easily. I've wondered about the display difference though.

I've had a lot more time in a Vive and am going to get to compare to a Rift again soon but my recollection is that the Oculus had a better display. I also might not have "dialed in" my Vive well. The Oculus was setup for me by a friend who is an Oculus engineer, so I suspect he set it up correctly. I'm going to read up on tuning the Vive display right now. :)

What do you mean by the new medium going forward? What are you expecting it to replace, or do you not expect it to replace anything?

It's the first time humans will move from speaking in binary with one another to interfacing with one another in binary. Good luck to regimes like China keeping up with their censorship like they can today when we can all talk and exchange ideas in a VR world while speaking what seems to be the same language in realtime.

If other forms of internet communications are any indication, China will have its own virtual universe, shut off from any outside influence, "harmonized" with the party line, requiring real names and such, and likely larger than any Western one.

>requiring real names and such

If facebook and google have any say, then America will too.

Google, fortunately, retracted the real names policy a year or so ago. Sometimes common sense still wins.

I personally don't think it'll so much "replace" as much as open up new doors. As in Cinema/TV didn't "replace" theatrical performances, theatre is still around and strong, but the audience has mostly shifted to movies/TV because it is more scalable and flexible.

There's a bunch of apps that are trying to make virtual desktops in VR or 360 movies and the like. I don't personally buy into those that much, I think 360 movies are difficult to make interesting and virtual desktops are more for Augmented Reality.

Besides the obvious (VR games), I think there is a potential for a new form of entertainment (maybe a hybrid of theatre/cinema), for more advanced design tools that make faster work of 3D-based design, for educational experiences. Some things might be "replacements", but there are a lot of possibilities that a VR environment opens up for things that would not be compelling or practical on a 2D screen with common input controls.

>I personally don't think it'll so much "replace" as much as open up new doors. As in Cinema/TV didn't "replace" theatrical performances, theatre is still around and strong, but the audience has mostly shifted to movies/TV because it is more scalable and flexible.

Theatre is niche whereas once it was mainstream though. And it has been ages since its been culturally relevant in the way movies are discussed etc, even for high-bro audiences (e.g. since the 50s or so in the US, or around the 70s for European audiences).

Movies are still like theater though. You can go all things you might do at the theater at the movies: Eat a snack, have a drink, whisper commentary to your significant other. Essentially it's scalable theater.

With VR, you're trying to be 'inside' the media. Imagine a bunch of people feeling around for their drink or bumping heads as they try to whisper. I think if this iteration of VR becomes successful, it will be because they found a niche for themselves. But I can't imagine it becoming the default medium for anything, not even games.

You can put the other people in the VR experience too.

Google at IO/2016 showed some experiment with schools using cardboard where they raytraced where each student in a classroom was looking at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuceLtGjDWY

With full body tracking and depth cameras you could put 3d avatar bodies in.

Obviously the face would be obscured by the headset, but it's dark in a cinema and people are normally looking at the screen when watching TV at home. So it might actually end up being more social.

Even with just simple 3d positioning of the headset and input devices with a simple visual indicator is enough to get a sense of someone being present. Add a microphone and 3D spacial positioning of voices.

Of course the current generation of technology would make that hard and rare. Not too many people you know will buy a $1000 headset. Everyone would need to bring that and a fairly powerful computer to the one place.

Although physically being present in the same room isn't required.

A new medium never really replaces an old medium, it just starves all other media for time. So far VR is great for games, experiencing immersive environments (eg destinations), and some design/creation (eg tiltbrush).

I think it will get better as time goes on, but it is already really compelling. I realize I'm an early adopter, but my enthusiasm is only increasing. WebVR is fascinating, and it's possible to create, for example, a really compelling shopping experience where you could see the actual size of objects before buying.

Whoever comes up with a way for furniture and homewares retailers to demonstrate their products in your home is going to make a fortune, whether it's an open system or a whitelabel platform for scanning rooms, ingesting models and integrating with a shopping cart.

IKEA literally already has such an app in Steam.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/447270/

[2] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/about_ikea/newsitem/040516_Virtual...

It even has swedish meatballs

That's not really what OP is talking about - it's just a single pre-assembled kitchen scene containing only a few Ikea items.

It's a start. I already have my apartment mocked up in Sketchup, and I imagine it's not that hard to import that. It'll be hack-y at first, but it seems like a very achievable target for professional interior designers, etc. The tech could easily trickle down.

Even though the VR app is just a kitchen demo, IKEA has had Augmented Reality to place furniture in your own home in their standard catalog app for a couple years now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDNzTasuYEw So VR is the next step

Probably something like the Hololens is the next step for that, and Hololens is amazing, so seeing the furniture in your room without having to wave a phone around is going to change buying and decorating

VR is more a different direction, it's hard to take your house and represent it in VR for you to furnish. You could use something like the Matterport, but even then it's an hour or two before you can use it in VR.

I used to manage the engineering R & D department at a pretty major e-commerce retailer, they bought the oculus devkit and that was my first idea. I brought it up and was promptly shut down. Then they made me build a cars.com clone. Don't work there anymore.

Similar story: I backed the oculus kickstarter and one of the first thing I wanted to try it once it would be released is realtime 360 video (then move on later to realtime 3d 360). Not being in the Valley, obviously got zero funding, and now such cameras are commonplace; so frustrating.

This was demoed at Google I/O for Project Tango, featuring furniture from WayFair among others. It's not true VR but AR, which actually works better for this application. Until consumer project tango hardware has shipped in quantity, though, it won't get past the demo stage.

The great thing about project tango is that since it has accurate depth sensing and builds a 3D model of the space, furniture placed is accurate to scale. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYwc6nS7qs

I personally know of three companies trying to do this. It's a hard problem, one of them basically gave up on the problem, but someone's going to figure it out.

I guess the company that makes it easy will win.

A new medium never really replaces an old medium, it just starves all other media for time.

Really? So, TV and movies starved audio commentary and discussion for time? I suspect TV and movies became dominant, but they didn't completely eliminate audio. Games are a new medium, and they seem to coexist with other media. Books don't seem to be going away. If anything, new forms of media seem to be synergistic with the existing forms.

Maybe starved is too strong a term. I think we're both trying to make the same point - a new medium can exist, but it doesn't mean that the old media go away. You might just use them less. The idea of a new medium replacing an older medium 1-for-1 doesn't make much sense.

That said, the amount of attention people can pay to all media is essentially finite, and new media decreases the hold of old media. In a very real way the internet is killing print newspapers, by drastically reducing the amount of attention that is paid to them.

Likewise, if you look at printed books, they are much less important than they were 100 years ago, largely due to radio, television, movies, computers, and the internet.

Books might be less used by the majority, but they're still the most important medium. They're usually the highest quality, most vetted source of information and reading exercises your mind. As well, most content online today will be gone in 100 years, while we have books from 2,000 years ago. It sounds weird to the modern, arrogant man who mocks something so old fashioned, but the printed word dwarfs all these other inventions. Nothing is replacing it.

> They're usually the highest quality, most vetted source of information and reading exercises your mind.

That's kind of an arrogant categorization.

1) We all read, regardless of the material the text is presented on.

2) I've bought and borrowed an immense amount of really awful books, and I've read a ton of truly insightful, well worded and interesting stories, posts, discussions online.

Sure internet is ful of crap, but I believe it's equally full of great ideas that wouldn't get a chance to be published on paper, whether that is because the author doesn't feel he/she can fill a book, they are not appropriately confident about their work or any number of other factors.

Online, you can crowdsource the editing process and everything (most) good will be visibly published. If that is not succeeding a medium I don't know what is. Honestly I'm not even comfortable calling them different medias. I believe text is the medium, the same way 2d video is a medium, from 35/70/135mm celluloid through VHS/betamax through all imaginable codecs online. There's really no difference in how you process the information.

There's an incredibly huge difference between text and video and how the information is processed. Your statement literally rejects the validity and significance of the director of photography's job

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematographer

If I'm not mistaken, they meant that text == text, just as video == video - not that text and video are directly comparable.

There's no difference between a printed and bound book full of (for the sake of argument) Tumblr posts and the same posts online - or alternatively, a betamax video, and the same video captured and encoded in an MKV container.

The parent comment meant that there is not a big difference to them on which medium (paper book, iPad, desktop monitor) they read a text, "text" is its own category instead of paper vs electronic. Similar "video" is its own category. Watching a Football game on a gigantic 60 inch screen vs on your small phone the big screen may be more comfortable, but it doesn't fundamentally change how you process the information (compared to reading what happened on Wikipedia or hearing radio play-by-play commentary.)

The other replies have already clarified it better than I did, but from the horses mouth: Yes, of course video is different from text. I meant as the other comments suggest that text is no different from text, and video is no different from video. I called both of them their own (separate) medias.

Sorry for the ambiguous phrasing.

Most content online doesn't require quite the attention span and focus of reading a book. There's just no equivalency between Facebook and The Republic. Books usually have better vetted sources and an editor going over it. I've never seen anything that originated online like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Except maybe The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

And I doubt that the next "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" will originate online either. It might be advertised online, eventually people will pirate it in epub form but no one is putting a great work online first. Because what I'm saying is true.

"I've read a ton of truly insightful, well worded and interesting stories, posts, discussions online"

As have I. It's not worthless, I love the internet. It's just not replacing books. When all the drives fail that store this conversation, there will be a million copies of The Iliad still in existence. I stand by my original statement, books dwarf all these other mediums.

I like the Chris Milk quote "VR is the last medium." Because VR (eventually) encapsulates all of our senses and all of our actions, all other media, past and future, can be encapsulated in VR.

smell-o-vision disagrees :-)

It depends on how you define VR ... if you define it as covering every sense, then yes, by definition is encapsulates all other media. But if you define it as how its implemented, then no, because net every sense has been implemented. Smell, temperature, wind, acceleration, weightlessness, full-body touch ... we're a long way from the holodeck.

True, but those are all enhancements that will come to VR, not themselves new mediums.

You could say that the interactivity/3D of VR was an enhancement to the TV.. and therefore not a new medium

VR is new and thus not well defined. The name, at least, is inclusive of all technologies that simulate a sensory experience, in a way that "television" never was.

No, because TV was never meant to simulate reality, and simulating reality is what VR is and that naturally includes all the senses.

VR is interesting. It gives content creators a lot more options to engage participants, but it also takes an axe to their knees in their ability to control things. The author has no control over where the participant is looking - and with room-scale tracking, very little control over where the participant is standing either.

The most successful content in my view capitalizes on this freedom, and provides new spaces for participants to express themselves. You do not have to roll on the floor to dodge lasers in the arcade shooter Space Pirate Trainer, but it is fun to do, gives you a workout, and was not programmed into the game.

If it replaces anything, it will be things like museums, casual sports (ping pong, pool etc that require big space commitment for a singular activity), and social interaction tools like skype.

The travel industry (packaged trours) say it will replace catalouges. Sounds plausible for me and as far as I heared there are a few pilots going on.

Great application.

Will also replace pictures in real estate listings I suppose.

I just got done apartment hunting recently, and there's walkable virtual tours of just about every apartment, at least in my region on apartments.com.

Basically a bunch of 360 panoramic shots with spaces you can click on the ground to traverse to the next spot that gives you another view, and it fades between the two, kind of like moving down the street in Street View with Google Maps.

It did a pretty damn good job of giving you a feel for the apartment (we toured many of them afterwards).

Obviously actual VR would be better, but what they've got now is pretty darn good already, and definitely a lot better than pictures.

That being said, I think most home listings still rely on low-res still pictures, which is a shame.

People still use catalogues?

So you kinda thought VR was hyped, but it didn't stop you from ordering a Vive?

I think VR is incredibly hyped, just as it was 15 years ago.

What do you imagine this new medium replacing? Games? Movies? Monitors?

It replaces the default reality.

What can I say, I'm a compulsive early adopter =P I also have an Apple Watch and a Myo armband, but haven't found a ton of compelling uses for them yet. I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to develop for it early if I was wrong and I had the cash to buy it.

The difference from 15 years ago is that the hardware is actually here and practical. We have the tracking and displays and they are actually really good. It really creates presence, there is 0 comparison between Oculus/Vive and VR experiences of yesterday, such as the Aladdin ride in Downtown Disney. Hell, HTC is literally pivoting the entire company to the Vive. HTC/Valve + Facebook + Sony + Samsung is a ton of top-notch engineering effort being put into just the first generation of devices/software.

See my comment above, but basically I imagine it'll create new media/experiences rather than replace. I don't think "floating monitors in space" will ever be compelling (maybe in AR), and I don't think "movies" as we think of them now will be practical (though I do think there is room for a more "theatre-like" approach).

If the displays get a lot higher res, I could see myself using stacks of floating displays for apps instead of my current multimonitor display. Imagine being completely surrounded by digital paper that defies the laws of physics.

For me, the headsets would also need to be way lower profile. I think by then the distinction between AR/VR will be very small though.

Research is promising: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field...

Wow, that's cool. Light-weight, close to actual sunglasses size, and able to correct for prescription? I want to try these.

They were letting people try them on at the Emerging Technologies booth at SIGGRAPH. You could get yourself one of the cheap passes and come down to Anaheim in a couple of weeks, I'm sure they'll have their latest revision.

I'm actually going to be in Anaheim the weekend of the 16th (Disneyland), but making it back down there a week later isn't going to work with my already planned vacation later. :/

If only I could find a way to convince my employer that this conference is related to the job at hand...

Probably just games, though other uses will pop up too. TotalBiscuit (the Youtuber) said he got one of the Samsung VR things (I forget the name, the one where you put your phone in it) and used it to watch a movie on a long flight, and it completely removed his fear of flying.

Gear VR is the name.

After playing Elite: Dangerous with the Rift, I can corroborate that it's a legitimately amazing experience that is a huge step up from both playing with stereo 3D or regular monitors.

VR might stay as a somewhat specialized medium, but within the medium the possibilities are very compelling.

>Monitors?

Maybe someone can chime in here, but doesn't the Hololens team already do some dev by wearing them in place of monitors at this point?

I've heard that but I really suspect that is just some story put out largely for PR sake. The resolution is something around 720p per eye. But that essentially means 720p total, right? Because the "per eye" part basically means that it is stereoscopic 720p.

The one scenario I imagined working at that resolution that would really be helpful is if you were actually working on the the code in your current view? Then updating and reloading wouldn't require you to take the headset on and off.

But stories of the engineers not using regular monitors anymore seems a bit far fetched.

This is the only reason I am waiting for the next Gen VR. The resolutions right now are just too low.

I tried the vive demo and was blown away (I could play the spice pirate trainer game until my body gave out) but the low resolution was noticeable (along with the screen door effect) and I had trouble reading text.

But there is something to be said for having your entire vision devoted to what you're doing. Once resolutions get higher, you have almost your entire FOV to devote to code, browsing, whatever.

And being able to control your screen just by moving your head will be pretty crazy.

VR definitely hits games and porn pretty naturally, right now. Games like Hover Junkers are an example of great early execution in this medium.

I think VR movies are a still a bit off, though I could be totally wrong. The reason I say that is because some of the fundamental theories used in making a movie are different in VR. Namely, you can't be certain you know where the "camera" is. :) Also, VR movies require a lot of new and developing camera hardware and editing software to come along. There are some cool things out now but my understanding is it is all very new and developing. Ultimately, I still buy in on VR movies, though. I am a believer in VR movies mainly because of my own experience watching short films in VR was super cool but also from watching videos of people curled up in the fetal position as they were being shown some scary movie in VR. It's visceral in a way that has not been achievable up until now.

I also think AR well be a widely adopted medium and there might become a pretty gray distinction after a while. I could imagine headsets or glasses that you can increase or decrease how much external light comes through. I can see doing things like checking email, facebook, etc. being done in AR but still allowing you to go about your normal routine like making coffee and breakfast or walking the dog. Seems far more compelling than looking at notifications on my watch.

Eventually, I also suspect that we will be "mainlining" these experiences and not be wearing headsets at all. Implanting some device that directly stimulates the necessary parts of the brain (or other parts of the body needed).

Namely, you can't be certain you know where the "camera" is.

Aren't you assuming that they would allow the wearer to change the camera position?

You could film a movie or design a game such that the camera location is fixed or on rails. You're more like an observer than a participant.

Eg. Chronos and Edge of Nowhere

I believe the GP was refering to the production of films and movies. For example, much of the Lord of the Rings films were shot with forced perspective. How would that translate into a VR medium?

I would agree that my language was a bit loose but what I'm talking about still applies as long as the viewer can turn their head.

The main issue I was thinking about was that you cannot say for sure where your audience is looking at any moment in time.

Have you seen Pearl from Google's Spotlight Series? It's a VR film that shows how you can get around the "limitations" of VR: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3060252/dont-be-surprised-if-goo....

I definitely agree though. You can't just take what works in film and expect it to work in a VR film. It'll be interesting to see how filmmakers experiment with the medium as more and more start pushing what it can do.

I have a friend who partnered with another guy and they bought the Nokia OZO recently. I'm really excited to see what they do and hopefully will get to figure out someway I can participate and be useful. I'm very intrigued by video for VR. Though I am kinda sold on light field tech eventually being the solution.

That link is cool. I'll read it in depth. Thanks! I am excited by the possible shakeup in film theory caused by VR. I believe some really cool artistic innovations are going to come coupled with the technological ones.

>VR definitely hits games and porn pretty naturally

The consensus at /r/vive is that VR porn is pretty terrible. You either deal with uncanny valley stuff for 'real' 3D scenes or just awkward camera placements and other issues for 360 movies. There's also a psychological effect of being 'too close to the action' or 'first person porn being unsexy' many have complained about.

I think the "tech will succeed because of porn" is a problematic mantra nowadays. I don't see facebook, Apple, etc succeeding because of porn. If anything, those platforms either outright block it or give a substandard porn experience. I don't think porn tells us anything nowadays.

I wasn't saying "tech will succeed because of porn".

Theoretically? Everything.

>What do you imagine this new medium replacing? Games? Movies? Monitors?

Why would it? It supplements my other recreational activities. The same way a Xbox didn't replace PC gaming or flat screen TV's didn't replace movies.

>I think VR is incredibly hyped, just as it was 15 years ago.

I own a Vive. Its kinda amazing. No, people won't be "locked in VR and refuse to leave" and other hysterics, but what we are able to do right now is exceptional. Its the most interesting thing I've bought in a long time. I see these breathless essays on HN and reddit about new cellphones or some new laptop that you have to squint to see the difference between the old and the new versions. I think some level of hype is justified here. If people can lose their shit over the annual new iphone or ipad then can certainly lose their shit over VR.

That said, there is a lot of hype, but that's part of being in a competitive marketplace full of marketers and advertisers. Arguably, if the hype was toned down then a lot of people interested in VR would have never heard of the Vive.

Hype/marketing/pr serves a purpose.

I tried the Vive, with the TiltBrush game/app, and one shooting one. No haptics.

It was really quite incredible, and I was skeptical coming in. However, it was incredible in a "super high tech sparklers" kind of way, that I'd like everyone to check out once for fun. I don't really see any future in them.

The vive has haptics in both controllers.

It's neat, but do you find yourself looking forward to playing it still? The novelty is fantastic, but until the software shows up (I'm not a gamer), it feels like a demo.

I worked on a demo experience for the Vive unveiling and for the first time in my career I felt like VR was more than a gimmick. We were working with beta (maybe more like RC) hardware, had no controllers, and only one tracking cube.

I had two a-ha moments with it that sold me... There was a small demo room called something like Shopkeeper (think an old goblin's hut filled with wares) and I actually reached out to grab a faerie/wisp that was buzzing nearby. The second was a Valve demo app where a Portal like robot came stomping into the room and I actually jumped the F out of the way, only to have the floor start falling out from under me and scrambling back to safety.

For a few fleeting moments at a time there was no virtual, it was reality and it was freaking amazing. And all this without the added immersion the controllers provide.

The Vive is by far the best VR setup I've tried. It's made the rifts we had around seem like toys.

A vive headset without controllers is by itself objectively worse than a rift on all accounts. Maybe your experience shows how important software is.

There are definite points of contention on this. The Vive headset doesn't face nearly as significant a glare issue as the rift, it is far better for glasses wearers than the rift and for some people the improved brightness is a significant advantage.

Integrated audio is definitely nice, but not a deal breaker and the improved ease in reaching a comfortable setup is definitely and advantage, but it makes trade offs in other areas.

You could split hairs about where the trade offs were made (fov vs SDE) but the displays and optics are so similar that those dont matter.

Those demos are both part of The Lab, a set of VR demos distributed by Steam. To everyone else with a Vive: get it. It's free, and it's frickin' awesome, even though the Steam description spoils one of the games.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/450390/

I tried a Vive the other day. It's the closest experience to magic I've ever had which didn't involve sacrificing chickens.

What game does the description spoil? I have a Vive and have played all the Lab demos and I don't really see anything that spoils any of them.

For those who want to show Vive to friends: http://imgur.com/qJucDyO

Also if you have a somewhat okish wheel+pedals Project Cars, Assetto Corsa (needs ReVive) and Dirt rally are all great experiences. Though this doesn't take advantage of the room scale stuff (so can be done with an Oculus) but still found that great enough to go and buy a Vive for my home racing sim setup.

That's fantastic, thanks!

I'd update that to add H3VR

H3VR seems so mundane if you hear someone describe it:

"Yeah, it's a game where you get to shoot a variety of guns, all of which are very nicely modeled and have accurate mechanics like bolt handles that work etc in a variety of shooting ranges"

I mean, who would want to play that... but when you do, oh my goodness is it satisfying. The fact that it's VR makes rather mundane sounding experiences incredibly immersive and great. I've pretty much stopped playing all the great "normal" non-VR games that I bought in the steam sale because of VR.

Now imagine if you could create a triple A game on this platform. Holy fucking shit, it's going to be the end of the world.

There's also now SculptrVR for 3D building/drawing.

That balloon was the first experience I had, and made me realize the first bug on the vive: the chaperone (thing that hints your room boundaries) doesn't tell you where your ceiling is.

I chased the balloon and jumped up and smacked it in the ceiling. Didn't break it though (as far as I can notice)

It should be trivial to add imho; they are tracking in 3d; so chaperone could also watch in 3d; it's just that they don't...

Some people would always see the ceiling grid, which might lower immersion.

It should track the controllers; not your head; only if you're always with your hands at shoulder/higher level...

That's a good point, and something my Vive setup has been struggling with. My play area is just a little bit too small, so I see the boundaries a lot. It's not as bad as not having them and periodically punching a wall or walking in to the couch, but it's kind of a bummer to see it and go, "oh, right, I'm in my living room," especially in some of the much more immersive experiences.

You should be able to turn it off then, much like how you can change the wall pattern on the chaperone and turn it off completely if you desired right now.

I think they added it, actually.

The chaperone doesn't help if you're a noob--you drive your controller through the wall regardless of the chaperone. You get used to your room after a while and it stops happening.

The Lighthouse boxes are supposed to be aimed at a downward angle. I think that limits the ability for the Vive to track any kind of height past a certain point. Unless they did a calibration similar to the floor calibration where you hold the controller as high as you can and it just sets that as the de-facto "ceiling", there might not really be a way to do this reliably without additional Lighthouses.

> I'm 100% convinced VR is the new medium going forward.

Maybe we should stop chasing that elusive high of extensive growth and just come to terms with the fact that computing is now a mature industry. There will be no more double-digit growth rates.

I must say that having purchased both the Vive and the Oculus, my vote is for the Oculus:

- easier to set up, the Vive requires these little captors placed at odd angles, that need to be powered and that make noise when powered

- the oculus is lighter. I find the weight of the headset to be a major factor for not playing long periods, more than motion sickness, particularly given that some games require some weird viewing angles

- the headset has less cables. I have the feeling of wearing an octopus with the vive

- I regularly lose tracking on the vive for short moments (grey screens) even though the captors are in direct line of sight and less than 3m away

- I have the feeling the vive is a lot blurier when looking at the sides of the screen. Not something one does when a zombie is trying to kill you, but certainly something one does when navigating menus

The only downsides of the oculus are:

- vertical green line between the two eyes, very visible in a dark environment

- the oculus pauses the game when I take off the headset. Except that I do that when a game is holding me hostage with some interminable, unskippable story telling instead of letting me play VR (too frequent!)

For niche cockpit genres like simracing Oculus is probably the better buy. Comfort is king when you're trying to run an endurance race.

Personally haven't tried Oculus, but the Vive does get really heavy on the face after 30 minutes or so.

My Rift doesn't have a vertical green line between the two eyes. That sounds like a technical issue.

Maybe distance between his eyes is larger than distance between your eyes, and he is seeing the edges that aren't normally seen for most people.

I've heard a lot of good things about the Oculus, especially the touch controllers.

My main experience demoing the dk2 around was that the first thing everyone did was try raising their hands in front of their face, and that motion sickness hit about 30% of people. The Vive fixes both of those problems, and they're first to market.

Still, facebook has deep pockets, and from everything I've heard their headset is better and their controllers are better. I can't wait to give them a try.

The next big thing that I want in VR is multiplayer.

There are actually already a bunch of pretty decent VR multiplayer games (at least for the Vive). Some of my favorites, on Steam:

Battledome, Rec Room, Hover Junkers

There's a bunch more, but these are the most polished, in my opinion. Battledome/Rec Room really shine because you can get right next to a person, wave at them, talk to them (built in mic on the Vive headset). It's super immersive and cool to be literally right next to a person that is maybe in another country.

I've tried Rec Room and I really like it. It's amazing how much fun it is to play with someone else.

It still seems like early days for multiplayer. There's no way to see other people's facial expressions, and the avatars are pretty basic. There's also no support for having a local multiplayer experience. Hololens is doing some interesting things, allowing multiple headsets to see the same holograms, but their hardware is still super limited. The void is also doing interesting things.

I guess I should have said that I want better multiplayer.

Oh for sure, these aren't even large studios, most of these are single developers working part-time after hours on them.

The Void's Ghostbusters game looks amazing. They are using custom hardware and a more expensive tracking technique, but it is an awesome example of a "VR-Arcade" sort of business.

I've only tried Hover Junkers off your list but it is my current favorite game. It's so awesome, my friends come over and play and my main issue is how to deal with a gross sweaty headset after someone has been jumping around in it for 30 minutes. :)

If you like pool, Pool Nation VR (http://store.steampowered.com/app/269170/) is both multiplayer and fairly polished.

Disclosure: A friend of mine worked on it.

Many of the top titles on both Vive and Rift are multiplayer (Elite Dangerous, Battle Dome, Eve Valkyrie, Tabletop Simulator, Hover Junkers, Pool Nation VR, etc.) and that's only games, ignoring purely social multiplayer experiences like AltspaceVR. I'm not sure why you think there is a lack of multiplayer content currently or in the pipeline (Project Arena, Ripcoil, The Unspoken, RIGS )...

I haven't found the Vive uncomfortable as far as weight but it did slip off my head when I was jumping around playing Hover Junkers. If it were lighter, it would probably have stayed in place.

I didn't like the light gap around the nose of the Oculus but I would assume it's easy enough to "plug up."

I'm sure you're points are valid for your setup, but just a few notes:

- The Oculus Touch controllers will require placement of two cameras (when they come out), similar to the two Vive base-stations. You're currently comparing the setup of a seated Oculus experience to a Room-Scale Vive experience, it's like comparing setting up a Chromebook vs a Desktop computer. Yea, the desktop takes more setup, but it's more powerful.

- There's 1 3-in-1 cable on the Vive that has HDMI, USB, and power, and then there's a really short one that connects to earphones/headphones. Are you sure you are talking about the consumer version?

- If you lose tracking often, you probably need to alter your setup, or make sure you don't have a large reflective floor or mirror in your tracking space. The Vive uses lasers for motion tracking that have sometimes been interfered with due to high reflectance. I've personally never had tracking issues I couldn't resolve by repositioning.

You also don't need to put them at weird angles, mine are on either side of the room, basically 1 foot above my head facing each other. They have a rather wide 120 degree field of view.

- You can adjust the focus distance on the Vive, might want to check that if you are having blurriness. That said, the resolution on both devices is identical, but they are both not super-high as they are the first consumer devices of this generation, so it won't be picture perfect. That said, it doesn't generally hurt the immersion if the game/experience is well designed.

That's just some information / my experiences, the Oculus is a great device, I just personally think the Vive really leap-frogged them in this first round.

On the set up, it might be right but unfortunately I do not have a room to spare for a full room VR.

The odd angle I am refering to is having the sensors above the player. I used a bookshelf on one side but had to buy a tripod on the other side.

On the cable, the problem is that even when seated, you end up turning on yourself, and then you don't have one but many cables to manage that you cannot see. It almost requires some assistant.

On blury edges, it doesn't feel like a resolution problem, rather an optical problem. Perhaps my headset wasn't adjusted properly but I couldn't find a way to improve it.

Ah ok, yea I haven't really tried a seated experience on the Vive, I could see that being the case.

I use command strips on the walls for my base stations in my bedroom, so no tripods take up any space and no damage to the walls =)

The blurry edges could be a focus thing, could also just be how it is, I've personally experienced a better FOV on the Vive than the Oculus, but I could be mis-remembering.

Blurriness can eventually be helped a bit by supersampling (already possible, just need a powerful system to handle it), and some work being done on things like foveated rendering [1] helping to create higher-res displays.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKR8tM28NnQ

Setup can be full of issues for sure - but when it is working properly you should never be losing tracking. Are you using the sync cable? Things got a lot better when I started using that. I still am not understanding the "many cables" functionally there is only one. It is a pain to deal with, but if there is any roomscale with Oculus touch, you will run into the same issue until we can get wireless systems.

Blurry edges depend a lot on where the headset is sitting on your head, and playing with the straps can really improve the experience (even the feeling like it's heavy). Mine is fairly tight on the sides and then long on the top strap, pulling everything back a lot further than it feels like you are supposed to.

Anyway, not trying to criticize your preference, but hoping your Vive experience can get a bit better.

Vive is not designed for seated use. You really need to use it in 3D space to appreciate it.

That may be the case but VR manufacturers needs to think hard whether they will stand a chance to go mainstream if they require a full room with no furniture.

You don't necessarily need a full room with no furniture, just a big enough space in a room, which can be temporary - for example, I use half my kitchen with the table moved back. You only need 1.5 x 2 m minimum (though that is a little restrictive).

I think 100,000 early adopters given the current very high price suggests going mainstream isn't much of a problem.

Your tracking issues may be due to how your base station on your bookshelf is positioned. Is it clamped to the bookshelf and tilted downwards? If it is just sitting flat, then that's not following what the instructions said, which is to have both base stations positioned at least 6 feet high and tilted downwards 35 to 45 degress.

It is, I bought a tiny tripod for the book shelves.

> On the set up, it might be right but unfortunately I do not have a room to spare for a full room VR.

Are you using roomscale? It wasn't clear from your comparison. It's the biggest difference that matters between Vive and Oculus. Roomscale is fundamentally a superior experience. Until Oculus has a generally available implementation of it, Vive is at a different level above Oculus.

I am using the seated experience. Unfortunately I do not have a spare room to dedicate to VR

Since you already have the Vive, you should at least try roomscale once by temporarily moving around furniture. It changed my perspective on the potential of VR.

There's code paths in the driver for artificial vignetting - likely added as a means for reducing risk for motion sickness in fast moving scenes. If those paths are activated erroneously (there's quite a few bugs transitioning between game and menus)

I also own both, and I find myself agreeing with you on half these points and disagreeing on the other half.

In particular, the Vive is really only harder to set up because it's the full deal right out of the box. The Rift is just the headset, an Xbox controller, and a single webcam that you can place on your desk. Out of the box, the Rift is wholly incapable of room-scale VR. Of course, that will change with Touch, but at that point it won't be any easier to set up.

I will agree with you that the Rift's picture quality is significantly better. The Vive suffers from severe chromatic aberration towards the edges. You do get used to it very quickly because of how engaging the experiences are, but when I switch between the headsets it's the very first thing I notice.

I think the problem of comfort is a complex one. The Rift is definitely lighter and it has a better weight distribution. And yet somehow the Vive is really not uncomfortable at all for me. It has a much softer face cushion for one thing. Overall I'd say it's a bit of a wash in this department. I slightly prefer the Rift, but not as much as I thought I would.

I agree that the Vive Basestations are a hassle to setup, they do have an advantage of not having to take up a USB port and not having to be connected to your computer compared to the Oculus cameras. The Touch controllers will come with a second camera which I think is required.

I agree with you that the Oculus is more comfortable most of the time, unless you have glasses. The Vive has enough space to accommodate glasses, but I could not get the Rift on comfortably, though they fit fine in my older DK2.

Funny enough Dunkey parodies the complexity of installing and using the HTC Vive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z55rJznqF3E

If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey [1] you will see that HTC Vive is "winning" two-to-one [2].

But sobering reminder of how far consumer-grade VR has to go: users with VR headsets are 0.15% of Steam's installed base.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey Caveat: Participation is optional.

[2] Caveat: this assumes that all HTC Vive and Oculus Rift users are Steam users. Oculus has its own store.

Being backed by Valve, if the Vive wasn't winning on Steam something would be seriously wrong.

For more context, the default store on Oculus is Oculus Home, not Steam. Even so much as when you put a Rift on your head you are by default in Oculus Home.

That does not cancel the fact, that only a minority of desktop gamers do not have Steam constantly running on their PCs.

I think it's very likely that if you own an Oculus, you have Steam as well. Perhaps a correlation between 90-95% (VR has more uses than just games but games is what they're leading with. Steam = Games.) The opposite is not true: if you have a Vive you won't have Oculus' store app.

So drawing conclusions from Valve's numbers is reasonable, as long as you understand the caveats.

It's not winning on Steam, but winning among all users who also have Steam. Still, it is probably an imperfect survey - not sure how they detect presence of a Rift. Maybe the Rift tends to be not plugged in for typical Steam games, so many Rift owners remain undetected (just saying that is a possibility, not that it is the case).

0.21% (Vive+Rift) is actually quite impressive considering the very long preorder delays.

I thought it was 0.15% for both but I see I've misread the data. Thanks for doing the math.

Given the audience here, I think it's worth a plug that web developers looking to develop VR experiences such as for the Vive should look into A-Frame (https://aframe.io), a WebVR framework.

I really like aframe, but I just has the feeling that for things like aframe, it would be similar to what the Web Apps has been experiencing: the performance will always a few steps behind the native alternative. Even for Vive/Rift, there's still vast space for improvement on the hardware/performance side, so I'd assume a long way before efforts like aframe.io to really take off.

I do use my browser on my iPhone still though, quite a bit. I think if webVR makes it possible to make more "VR friendly" interfaces for websites, it could be really helpful. As a web developer, I shudder at the idea of "responsive" now including designing for VR but as a VR early adopter that idea sounds great.

Not all the VR experiences will be AAA games. There are plenty of mobile and desktop indie games that are engaging and don't require state of the art performance (see GearVR). Also WebVR content doesn't rely on traditional DOM rendering that it's the main bottle neck for web applications to feel smooth.

Yes, WebVR is more performant (many webpages struggle to achieve even 60fps). But minimum 90fps, at a much higher resolution is a challenge even running on bare metal right now. And that is needed for even the simplest VR experience (unless you don't move your head that much, but then what's the point of VR).

True, the 2D web may have had its performance issues, but the 3D web can actually be surprisingly performant. Browsers with the new WebVR API implementations can maintain high framerates starting with 90.

Even with a JIT and garbage collector? Because there's a difference between 90 FPS and "90 FPS, except when it stutters"...

I think the future of VR has a place for the web, but I'm skeptical there's a place for JavaScript. Good thing we'll have WebAssembly... eventually.

I'm running a DK2 on a GTX 660Ti and, now that there are more games that support VR, I'm starting to get those stutters. It breaks the experience entirely.

We studied carefully the latest implementations, and I can tell you that the performance of webglis in on par with OpenGL Desktop. It makes sense when you look at how Webgl is implemented, being a simple binding to OpenGL ES. If you are in SF, there will be a presentation tomorrow evening Thursday 07/07 at the Mozilla's HQ about this.

Isn't A-Frame targeting Google Cardboard and similar solutions?

Not specifically. I'm sure that running on GearVR and Google's Gear-equivalent DayDream-certified phones is a goal. But, so far the focus has been just getting it to work well at all. Mostly on desktop.

A-Frame is actually currently focusing on Vive / true VR. Though many developers like to use it with Cardboard.

What would be the use case for VR on Web? I still remember VRML craze and didn't buy into it the first time, even though I had an Indy on my desktop!

Somewhat related: Nintendo sold 770,000 units if their Virtual Boy in less than one year.

The Virtual Boy was nothing against the current VR products and for a Nintendo product a pretty mediocre one then, maybe their biggest product failure but they still did 770k units.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy

$179 in 1995 is about $280 today. http://www.carinsurancedata.org/calculators/inflation/179/19...

Vive/Rift + desktop able to play it is close to $2k.

Good point and I agree that the Virtual Boy comparison is not perfect but two underlying questions remain:

1. Will VR achieve mass adoption in the next 5 years considering the high costs for GPUs and screens with high pixel density?

2. And if we get to a mass compatible price point, will VR be the killer medium the mass is looking for?

So, I still find the adoption rate of the Vive/Rift underwhelming and I do not see the high costs as the main reason. Millions of gamers invest in 3-4k rigs, why not in VR then? Those weak adoption rates might give a glance on the future--or if there will be any future--for VR.

1. GPUs certainly have halted in price.

2. Mobile VR will probably be the vehicle for mass adoption. From what I remember GearVR has hit over a million units.

> 1. GPUs certainly have halted in price.

I don't know about that one. The Nvidia 1080 GTX costs here in Europe around 750-800 Euros, that's what previously high end multi GPU cards have cost.

It's still a good price for the performance though.

Yes, but he entry level has halved in cost, rather than the upper levels.

But VR is more GPU intensive than playing on a 1080p monitor. From what I remember a Nvidia 970 GTX was recommended by Valve before the 1080 GTX was released which was pretty near highest end back then.

And many VR early adopters are now buying 1080 GTX to improve the often lacking frame rates.

1. Yes. You can play VR today with a GTX 970 (under $300). If progress continues, in 5 years a comparable card should cost $50-100.

2. I believe so.

People haven't shifted because the content isn't there yet. There's no League of Legends, Overwatch, etc. The big game dev companies haven't shifted over to VR yet because there are only 200k players - not enough to be worth it. But some are making big bets (IIRC 40% of Valve is working on VR) and it'll only accelerate as the price point drops and more people buy into it.

The Vive has only been out for 3 months, less than half the time the Virtual Boy was available for.

It's great that Vive has gained such traction (I personally contributed to that number), but I don't think VR has "hit it" yet. I think what Vive offers today is a good indicator of what would become the norm in VR in the next few years (assuming big companies keep pouring money in), when mass production of low cost equipment that provides experience similar to what Vive can do today. Low cost device + pretty good (but may not be the top notch) experience is what's needed for VR to really take off. Cardboard is trying to do that right now, but honestly it lacks a lot on the "pretty good experience" part.

Agreed, this is the iPhone 1 right now (like when it was $500), only early adopters / fans / developers will grab the higher end systems for now (although, the PSVR coming out later this year might change that a bit). But those people will show their friends and they'll start watching and then Gen 2 comes out, cheaper and better, and it takes off.

Cardboard/Gear (to some extent) is like a flip-phone for VR. Without positional tracking, it barely qualifies as VR imo, and honestly one of my fears is that people will try Cardboard/GearVR and assume that is all that VR is and will be turned off.

I think these large companies will continue to throw money into this for a while, hell look at all the news last week from HTC.

Totally agree on the potential damage Cardboard/Gear can do to VR. I had a friend who tried Cardboard he bought for $20, and his comment was "it really was just worth $20, or less".

I don't think we can tell if its the next iPhone 1 or of it's the the next Segway.

I take your point, but that's really not a great comparison. I somehow doubt Segway sold 100k units in a couple of months on their initial release, and definitely not many would have been directly bought by regular consumers.

I think what you said would have made sense a few years ago, the Palmer Luckey's kickstarter was first created. But right now, I'm pretty sure it's way past Segway territory. Not quite iphone 1 level yet, but perhaps equivalent to the first huge blocky cell phones. Still took a few years for cell phones to miniaturize and become cheap enough for everyone to own one, I'd say that's where we are with VR/AR right now.

I actually just meant to point out some things launch splashy V1s and can still end up as commercial successes without transforming the world. I know it's sacrilege around here, but VR ending up like the current era of segways (hoverboards, which sold something like 3 million units at $300 last year) seems like a reasonable place that VR will end up after it matures (so just a novelty that tons of suburban teenagers get for Christmas, not world changing technology for adults like smartphones were)

Ahh good point. I'm a bit more bullish on it than that though, mostly because I imagine VR merging with AR in the not too distant future, and I believe AR will be as world-changing as smartphones, if not more so.

I think this is the Newton or Palm Pilot right now. We've got years before VR is really an iPhone level thing (and yes I've used a Vive).

The problem with this comparison is that the iPhone 1 was supplanting phones that could do little more than call or text. It could do at least those things so there was no loss (except for monetary) to buying an iPhone over maintaining the status quo. Eventually the tech got better and better and the value of the phone shot way up against its price.

But a VR system needs software and is useless without it. If there aren't many users, they're not going to get software. If there's no software, no one's going to buy more units. If people don't buy the units, the manufacturers won't eat the cost to continue making them. Then we're back to square one.

If manufacturers really want this to work, they either need to pour tons of money into first party development or developers need to charge a lot more money for the games. I don't see either of these things happening, so I'm not holding out much hope for this generation of VR either.

You could argue the poor battery life and lack of third party apps as a significant detractor.

I don't see why anyone would buy an Oculus over a Vive. The software support for the Vive is just so much better on Steam. Additionally, the majority of PC gamers prefer Steam and it only makes sense they would want all of their VR games and traditional games to be under one service.

I really don't see how Oculus will even be relevant in VR games in about 2-3 years especially once the VR headset is commoditized.

I agree, at least until the Oculus Touch is around and well-reviewed, I really don't see a point in getting the Oculus over Vive at the moment. It's a few hundred more, but you're already paying a ton, so why not pay $200 more for something 100x better.

I believe the Vive is $200 more than the Rift.

You're right, also that $200 includes the controllers, Oculus owners will have to buy Touch when it comes out if they want it and that could be $200 or more, so probably comes out to the same price anyways =P

Because the Oculus headset works on Steam games, but the Vive doesn't out of the box work with Oculus Home. You can make it work, but it's not quite official. The Rift is also a little bit more comfortable and people seem to the think the display is generally better.

The real reason not to buy the Oculus is because there aren't motion tracked controllers for it yet. There also isn't a lot of room scale experience out there with Oculus so it's not totally clear how it's going to compare when the touch controllers are available.

Early reports sound positive, but early reports are early. The potential for the Rift seems a little greater. Oculus Touch controllers look like they are going to be a real nice piece of kit.

Disclaimer. I went with the Rift because it was more comfortable and I had no problem waiting for motion tracked controllers.

“Because the Oculus headset works on Steam games, but the Vive doesn't out of the box work with Oculus Home. You can make it work, but it's not quite official. The Rift is also a little bit more comfortable and people seem to the think the display is generally better."

What? Why would you want Vive to make it work with Oculus Home? Isn't that like saying you want your Android phone to visit Apple's App Store?

Vive works with Steam and I think that's more than adequate. And Vive works with Steam games too, so not sure why you said your first sentence.

This metaphor is dangerous. One potential future for VR is one where Oculus (or Rift) and Vive are two separate platforms, like smartphones. Some overlap in releases, but in general, no compatibility.

The other future is one where your VR device is a replacable peripheral, like a screen or a keyboard. It's absurd to think you'd have to double-check whether the game you want to play supports Dell monitors.

One of these futures is better for consumers, and I'd wager it's the second.

> Isn't that like saying you want your Android phone to visit Apple's App Store

That would be awesome, there's lots of iOS exclusive apps I wish I could use.

> And Vive works with Steam games too, so not sure why you said your first sentence.

Oculus gets Steam + Oculus Store. Vive only gets Steam.

Yes, the Oculus does work with Steam VR games (well, a fraction of them) because Valve was sensible enough to not put hardware checks in their games.

As for Oculus Home, you could say that it's the VR version of Games for Windows. Sure, it'll be around for a few years, but the dominant service will always be Steam. I'm not really sure why Facebook paid 2 Billion for them because their store is never going to flourish so if they were expecting to monetize Oculus that way then they really guessed wrong. I wouldn't be surprised to see their service shuttered just as Games for Windows was.

The problem with Oculus Touch (they're sweet-looking controllers, and I hope Valve steals that type of idea) is that it doesn't ship with every Rift. For Vive owners, a developer can assume that they all have room-scale positional tracking and motion controllers. With Rift, if a developer wants to write Touch support, they're shooting for a fraction of an already-tiny market. I mean, the Rift could fail before Touch gains any traction (hope not). Why would a developer take the chance?

Of course, Oculus' salvation is that they're owned by Facebook, so they'll never run out of money to throw at the problem.

I'm worried about the lack of camera on the Rift. Seem like Room Scale would be very hard without it. Seeing the borders if you started walking too far feels like a necessity to me.

The headset camera is not needed for showing borders. Vive does it with an overlay 3d grid in the Vr space. I don't think I ever used the camera in my Vive.

> Because the Oculus headset works on Steam games, but the Vive doesn't out of the box work with Oculus Home. You can make it work, but it's not quite official.

Works with seated SteamVR experiences, but not room scale ones, which I think is a more compelling experience.

I don't care about the room stuff at all. I don't want to jump around and don't have the space for it.

It will be simulators for me most of the time. Also other seated applications.

Having a headset that won't kill my neck is therefore much more important to me then...well. What exactly? I don't even see where I miss something.

I've held off on the VR sets because, imho, the games are just not there yet. My decision turns on one thing: I want a proper flightsim. Not mariocart in the sky. I'm talking JanesF15 with a fully interactive cockpit. I want to be able to look over my own shoulder and see a wing. I want to look left and see the runway I'm about to turn onto. The day that happens, then the VR headset will be the least of my purchases. Pedals, a throttle suite ... perhaps a special chair. Until then, inflating balloons and riding roller coasters just won't win me over.

I don't see why this hasn't happened yet. Flightsims, which lock the player into a chair anyway, would seem the perfect vehicle for VR.

Is this not DCS World?

There are a couple of flight sims available for VR now: DCS world, MS Flight Sim X (with a 3rd party add-on) and War Thunder.

Last I checked War Thunder didn't work for Vive, or possibly it was that making it work took hours of messing with stuff. Same story for FSX I believe.

VR is great but making any decent 3D model or environment requires enormous amount of labor. Without better tools I don't see VR being used for anything but games since you'll need to throw huge teams and many hours at making anything decent. Most (all?) VR apps and games I've used look like shit.

Lots of interesting research being done on this, keep an eye out for stuff from SIGGRAPH later this month.

Here's an example from SIGGRAPH Asia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM .

This is the real problem of VR right now. Content is much more expensive to produce than it is for the written language, music, or film.

Games are the one thing that takes equivalent development effort as VR.

The first billion dollar VR startup is probably the company that makes it cheaper to produce VR content.

There has already been a first (multi)billion dollar VR startup. Oculus.

You're right. However, VR-native tools for creating 3D environments are going to be vastly easier to use than desktop based ones (so much of the specialize skills required for using e.g. Maya are just because you're using a 2D mouse and a 2D screen to interact with a 3D world), so I feel that this problem will get quite a bit smaller (though not disappear, of course).

One reason why user-generated 3D content in general looks bad is that for a long time, "professional" content typically has lighting applied to surfaces as a texture, and that texture is expensive to compute and requires complicated software. User-generated models on the other hand (like one might find in Second Life) don't look that great in comparison because the lighting is simplistic and none of the models have pre-baked lighting textures.

As real-time global illumination becomes faster and better, I think we could get to a place where user-generated content looks pretty good by default, because it's always being re-calculated. I haven't really kept up with what the latest games are doing these days, so I don't know what the state of the art is, but there have been some pretty cool demos of real-time path-tracing. It may be awhile before that sort of thing is fast enough to meet the latency and resolution requirements of VR without being grainy, but I think we'll get there eventually.

Well, in our group we just started (academic) research testing out possibilities to bring data analysis, visualization and remote collaboration to VR (Vive).

I'm quite curious whether this will work out and what the future will hold for us.

So has our lab! We should really share some knowledge and experiences. If you ever need another academic lab in London to try some stuff out then give us a shout.

I think that would be a really great idea. Sounds like a lot of good ideas could be brought together.

If you want to get in contact feel free to shoot me an email at [redacted].

I, for one, am waiting for GitS style chat rooms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poKi7YyuamI

Isn't AltspaceVR or Oculus Social or vTime or JanusVR this? I mean, I'm pretty sure I saw an exact replica of this scene in JanusVR.

Just pick your favorite from the dozen or so Second Life forks.

What lab is it? Do you have any footage? How does it work?

It's the [redacted].

We literally got our Vive yesterday, so right now we are still in the concept phase. Hopefully I will have something to post on HN soon :)

Lemme know when you post it. iamwil@gmail.com

Pretty interested in what you guys are doing.

I recently watched the Arizona Cardinals documentation that is on Amazon Prime video (iirc it's called "All or Nothing" but searching for "Cardinals" finds it). It's excellent. The most interesting thing for me was that 5 NFL teams seem to be using VR to learn the playbook/go through scenarios. The Cardinals are one of them and it was a Rift. Unfortunately that sequence lasted about 5 minutes (don't remember which episode it was but probably across the midpoint).

Technically the Vive would have been a better choice as the room feeling is exactly what you want but I guess FB are pretty good at customer acquisition/signing big name contracts.

I'll buy one when I can have a room full of xterm windows.

Check out Virtual Desktop

That just draws a desktop onto a big texture. Plus it only runs on Windows.

http://fuscus.li Does free-floating windows. But, it's quite pre-alpha.

A metaphor I'm taking to calling "WIMP-Splat": Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers, splatted onto the inside of a cylinder. The vast majority of VR apps right now are WIMP-Splat interfaces. And it's kind of awful.

The few that aren't are a revelation. Tilt Brush and Fantastic Contraption come to mind. Just brilliant UX in both.

What would you like to see? I want this too. I decided not to spend time writing it, because of Virtual Desktop. Maybe I'll reconsider.

Envelop VR is working on this (https://www.envelopvr.com/)

I've tried the Rift DK2 and the Vive Developer Edition. What I've found is that VR just isn't there yet; it's too much of a hassle for there to be a critical mass of consumers willing to purchase a headset. The HMDs are very much alpha tests - if you're into VR, wait for the Vive 2nd generation to come out that hopefully works out the kinks (unless you have a ton of spending money).

Haven't seen the Rift CV1 but I know that the Vive, for me, still has the "screen door" effect. Until that goes away I'll always be reminded that I'm in a digital world - after all, I can see the pixels.

Ever since I accidentally fell asleep in an Alcatraz prison cell[1] while being Vive's room-scale VR, I started to appreciate my carpet on a whole new level.

[1]realities.io http://store.steampowered.com/app/452710/

I had both the Rift (got it because I was an original Kickstarter backer) and the Vive. The roomscale of the Vive together with the tracked controllers adds a lot to the immersion and that was the reason why the Vive is the one I kept.

In general the differences between the systems are overblown, you'll have a good experience with both.

Before VR makes any real headway in the regular Joe Consumer market, it must come down in price dramatically.

The actual VR hardware itself isn't entirely unreasonably priced. But, when combined with some beefy backend hardware, it's approaching "unreasonable" territory.

Is 100,000 a big number or a small one? Kinect sold 10 million units in the first three months (that's 133,000 a DAY). But it was half the price and didn't need such a strong PC - then again there is more PCs then xBoxes.

It's a good start for a $800 device, nothing more, nothing less.

Mass adoption on an iPhone scale will require a couple of iterations with improvements in performance, quality, software and price.

There are about 3-4m PC's that can run the Vive right now due to the power it requires (970 or higher GPU). When the Kinect came out there were 70m Xbox's. We really can't compare the two. The xbox had 20x the population.

The Vive has a lot against it: the price, the cost of a gaming PC, etc. 100k sales is pretty impressive. I assumed 50k would be a stretch by now.

Vive is so much better an experience than Oculus. I've tried the Vive version they were demoing to the public last year, and the current consumer Oculus. Presumably, the new Vive is better, but the version I tried was better then the actual consumer Oculus. That comes as a tremendous relief to me, as I'd never, ever buy into the Facebook VR walled garden. It's too bad Carmack had to join Oculus, but whatever, just glad there's a better alternative.

Steamspy is highly inaccurate, but I do think Vive sales are generally healthy, and it seems like they are making them about as fast as they can be sold now. It has enough of an install base for quality content to make it onto the top 10 list when they launch, as Pool Nation VR did a few weeks ago. The general public still has not tried VR (barring maybe cardboard) and a very vocal group is against the very idea of it. Still a pretty steep mountain to teleport up.

Steamspy has been established to be very accurate within its stated margin of error. It's generally accurate, just not precise.

Game developer here: SteamSpy's data is actually very accurate. We have a game on Steam and the actual sales figures are well within the error margins specified on the site. And other local devs has said the same about their games as well.

Vive and Oculus are both first-generation, early-adopter versions of VR. As such, arguing about which is "better" is unwarranted or at least premature. They are both capable learning and demoing tools. Neither one, as v1 offerings, will reach the mainstream. In fact, it is possible that neither will become the dominant consumer VR platform.

I demoed the vive in-store and attempted to pop the balloon I was given (which resulted in a loud clap of the two controllers -- thsnkfully they designed for bumps like this). Now I keep thinking of ways to play with the tiny area of space (apart from just teleporting). I want to dev for one so bad.

Searched for places to try Vive without spending $800 + PC cost: http://www.digitaltrends.com/virtual-reality/where-to-try-ht...

select MS Stores and GameStop

That link is missing Waterloo, Ontario's Ctrl-V VR arcade [1]. I went with a friend, it's affordable and fun.

[1] http://www.ctrlv.ca/

The more I look at these numbers in the tech world the more I see the huge divide in humanity. Even if they have sold 10 million units it's still a fraction of a water drop of the sea of humanity, more than frigging 7 billion.

100k is just 0.0014 % of humanity who got a Vive.

Bubbles, bubbles everywhere.

I'm not sure I follow your point. Your statement could be applied to when the internal combustion engine was first used in transportation.

How many units does a new product need to ship to be successful, then? A hundred million? For a fledgling tech 100k units is pretty impressive.

Your comment is the second most meaningless comment in this thread, right after mine.

I don't see a near future where the Vive is something I'll invest in, purely because I don't have the physical space to dedicate to it (not even temporarily).

I've tried the Vive and it is very cool, but I do wonder how much physical space will be an issue for its take-up in the UK. We've got a decent size house by UK standards (4 double bedrooms and 3 reception rooms), but, with two kids, I really can't think of anywhere that we could sensibly put one.

I'll just leave this here

https://youtu.be/KrcMvjAOTFE?t=33

I own a Firefly VR headset which I bought for $60. It works great for 360 videos on youtube and some games. The best part is it uses my phone and has a small wireless remote for navigating and making selections.

I don't understand the whole hype with Vive/Oculus. I know they are a beast compared to cheap VRs but requirement of gaming pc, strangling wires etc sets me off.

There are a lot of psychological factors that go into tricking the brain into "being present" in the VR space. When you use that $60 VR headset your seeing neat VR technology but your brain is never tricked. There is tons of research on this going back to the 70's. The Vive / Oculus is basically the first time we are getting close at this price point. There is still a ton of hardware and software work needed. For example seeing a fake body in VR takes you out but seeing your hands 100% tracked makes takes you back in.

I know that this is completely superficial, but I really wish I could have a Vive in Rift's industrial design. Part of me can't even get past the look of Vive. I know, when I'm using it I'm not seeing the outside. However, knowing what's strapped to my face just seems a little gaudy.

Good hand tracking is a total game-changer though. I suppose you could wait for Oculus Touch.

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