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Comment by timleewards | Hacker News Reader

I sure hope you want for a pc vr headset and not the oculus quest. HTC Vive Pro and Valve Index are simply stunning and can see them become the future of gaming.

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As an owner of both, it's hard to see them as the future because they are not accessible or democratized unlike the Quest product line.

Let's start with cost. Both headsets alone run around $1000 - $1200. If you build your VR ready PC, it's about $1500. If you pay Dell or HP, then it costs about $2000. We're already at $2500 minimum and we haven't even added the costs for Vive's wireless option which runs at an extra $350, so with wireless the cost is $2850 minimum; for the non-technical it could skyrocket to $3250 vs the Quest's $299.

Now let's talk about the "initial hill to climb" that most techies forget about. If you must deal with wires, then you have to do ceiling based wire control, where you mangle your room with ceiling hooks. For base stations, unless you have the perfect room with perfect furniture and you don't mind drilling into walls, it's a pain to set it up just right. It took me a lot of trial and error before I got it working flawlessly all the time. Let's also not forget that you need to install a wireless card for Vive's wireless accessory. Not everyone has both the skill and patience to deal with these time consuming annoying things.

Sure, there's no option for full body tracking, visual fidelity isn't as good, and nothing beats external tracking performance; but with Quest, it's $299. You put it on your head and you can play. I can buy a Quest for my mom.

Don't get me wrong, I really love both the Index and Vive Pro, but I am not forgetting about the work and costs associated with either platform

EDIT: I forgot the ritual I have to go through to get Vive and Index to work

1. Turn on computer

2. Put wires on ceiling

3. Turn on each base station

4. Turn on VR HMD

5. Turn on controllers.

1. Turn on Oculus

2. Turn on controllers

It's bad enough where my SO "doesn't want to hassle" me just to play VR.

https://youtu.be/sXmY26pOE-Y?t=3830

Except for ceiling cabling, which i personally dont need as i usually play seated games, i agree with everything else. What i meant tho (sorry for my phrasing) is that their _specs_ are the future. Less cables is great and indeed oculus is pretty straightforward. So i suppose once they cut the number of cables (or make htc’s wifi addon cheaper), make trackers remotely manageable and drop the price, i would see increased adoption.

Yes, as the other poster said, it is the best of both worlds device, especially since the USB 3 link now has several times the bandwidth of the Quest 2. I think PCVR is interesting in a supercar kind of way. It's going to provide an incredible experience at a price that will limit it to a small niche of the overall gaming industry. I purposely bought a mobile HMD because I think that will be the only way VR hits the mainstream, gaming or otherwise, so I wanted to understand what mobile can offer on its smaller performance budget.

Yeah I dont think vr’s future is mobile - cant be. There is only this much performance you can squeeze out of a mobile platform (even carmack himself seems to suggest that). Desktop gaming pcs are becoming cheaper by the day and gpu and cpu power are going up. My previous “gaming” pc cost less than 600 gbp and it handled oculus quite well. Now i reckon i own a quite powerful pc, cheaper than a macbook pro, and its flying through games. And most gamers are willing to spend money on such pcs. Anyway up to you, but i would recommend trying pc based vr as i have the feeling you will get hooked!

Thanks, I hope to soon! I'm personally in your boat and would happily tether to a space heater if it got me some extra polygons. I think the data shows there are far more gamers on console, mobile, and laptops than on rigs. And that's part of Google, MS, Nvidia, and Sony's big bets on cloud gaming, that plenty more people would game on their potato laptops if they could. I think the PS VR is an interesting model as well since I can see general consumers going for a wireless headset powered by the big box under their TV. If the Quest 2 doesn't meet FB's expectations then Sony's model may win.

With the Quest being able to be used as both a PC VR and and standalone, why not Quest? I'm saying this as someone who owns 4 different VR headsets, and I find myself using my Quest 1 the most.

Interesting - i steered away of oculus generally speaking as it was by far the buggiest headset I owned. From what gather tho it can only play low spec games decently. For instance, how does it handle Alyx?

I think it can only play Alyx through the link on PC, unless Valve decides to port it at some point in the future, which seems unlikely since they have their own investments in VR as a platform.

Valve is not able to port it - and likely never will be - simply because as a low end headset, the quest cant handle it. From what i read, oculus link leads to latency and compression quality losses so it cant really he played via cable either.

There are two ways to play pc vr games on quest. First is via wifi, with apps like Virtual Desktop, this gives you very good quality, but depending on your setup can range between perfectly acceptable latency, or terrible jittering and lag.

Oculus link gives you very good latency, but with the default settings the quality leaves a lot to be desired. You can tweak the render settings though, which fixes the issue, and it ends up looking about as good as Virtual Desktop. Only real unsolvable problem is the cable, but it's not a huge issue for me.

Alyx is quite playable through both of these setups (assuming good latency for a virtual desktop setup).

Take a look at 29:40 in Carmack's video. The Quest 1 link was running at just 150mbps due to encoder limitations and it apparently ran on a USB 2 cable and you didn't even need their fancy long USB 3 cable. Sounds like there's a lot more available encoder bandwidth on the Quest 2, so I'm hoping link will end up almost as good as traditionally wired VR.

The visual quality of the Index is hard to compare to the Quest.

Valve Index is great, but tbh, I've kind of abandoned mine for the RiftS in the front room. Losing the sensors and extra wires made the wife happy and the difference between the two isn't that great for me. As soon as Facebook lock you into FB accounts though, it'll be tossed to one side. I deleted my FB account 8 or 9 years ago and there is no way I'm going back over a VR headset. Thankfully i've purchased very little through the Oculus store.

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