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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

> "- Does not come with controllers or trackers (compatible with existing lighthouses, bring your own)"

This feels like a dealbreaker for me, and I should be firmly in the target demo for this product (PC VR user, flight sim enjoyer) - putting up Lighthouses on my walls so I can do some basic VR gaming is IMO a pretty tall order.

There's a really good reason inside-out tracking has practically fully displaced stuff that requires you to install new stuff in a room.

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I have a vive, and my lighthouses are on collapsible tripods that sit in corners of my living room when i'm playing. Takes ~5 min of time to set both up, point them in the right direction, and setup room boundaries in Steam. Works really well, if you prefer to do it that way! I think I would still prefer inside-out tracking, but I have very specific reasons for only using the Vive, so that's what I'm stuck with. I think it's a problem that can easily be overcome if you're interested in this headset, without having to drill holes into walls! It's definitely an extra expense though.

However, if their whole goal was "smallest lightest headset" then you can't really blame them for removing every single piece of tech from the headset they possibly could and outsourcing it to another device to maintain that claim. The right call? I dunno. But if this headset can be a drop-in replacement for my Vive one, I will buy the hell out of that. It's a strict upgrade for me with basically no extra expenditure of effort/money beyond the cost of the headset.

To each their own though!

> "However, if their whole goal was "smallest lightest headset" then you can't really blame them for removing every single piece of tech from the headset they possibly could and outsourcing it to another device to maintain that claim."

Sure you can - IMO (and of course reasonable minds can disagree) - you can surely blame a product when they've optimized to the point of going below-MVP.

I get the desire to be smaller and lighter than the rest, but IMO inside-out is table stakes and is part of the "minimum viable" requirement...

I've seen the portable lighthouse setups, but IMO that's even worse. I've done the lighthouse setup back when it was I had the Oculus CV1 - and those didn't even need to be positioned high on the walls, and IMO it was a huge pain the ass. I think I ended up using them a total of 5 times because of how much fiddling was required to get into VR.

PCVR is already a vanishingly small market, this particular quirk of the spec IMO puts the product below minimum viability.

This is a relatively small company, and this I think is their first foray into hardware. It makes sense they are targeting a niche market (PC VR users who already have a steamVR headset). Specifically, they are a company that makes Bigscreen VR, a desktop mirroring app. A lot of people bought Indexes, or Vives, and this is a possible sidegrade to those, especially if you are interested in the idea of "VR virtual desktops", which seems to be the entire point of this headset, with very high resolution and extremely low weight, and not even a 3.5mm jack for headphones.

Ditch your tripods and use shower curtain rods instead. Seriously, they are way better. https://james.darpinian.com/blog/mounting-valve-index-base-s...

This headset is going for the crowd already owning a kit, but wanting better visuals.

-Many Vive headsets are compatible with valve base stations, so there are many lighthouse kits around [0]

-This headsets supports both versions, 1.0 and 2.0

-Valve Knuckles are still considered the most advanced controllers on the market

0: https://www.vive.com/ca/support/vive-pro-hmd/category_howto/...

Yeah I have lighthouses set up for my Vive and for gaming would only consider lighthouse-based tracking for any future headsets (I've tried inside-out for stuff like Beat Saber and it's night and day), but for casual movie watching or virtual desktop use it's definitely a tall order.

I think for the "casual" use cases it might be possible to get away with a single lighthouse (~$100) and no controllers (stick to keyboard/mouse, console controller, or HOTAS) but that's pushing it.

For me, wires are terrible for Beat Saber much more so than the loss in tracking. I did have the wireless HTC attachment, but that had its own issues, so I primarily use a Quest 2 now despite having a full lighthouse setup.

You can buy light house compatible controllers from either Valve or HTC

Lighthouses are a pain to install and configure just right. However, it’s also the most accurate tracking system to date and it makes full body tracking possible.

Cheap camera tripods or lighthouse holders make it much easier to deal with

Inside out tracking is good for casual games, but you miss out on a lot of the experience in more in depth games. Lighthouses are also super easy to setup on tripods.

In what way? Most implementations of inside out do have controller tracking limitations due to body occlusion, but Quest Pro's controllers (which track themselves) suffer even less from this problem than Lighthouse does. Granted, it's expensive and a bit buggy, but it's a first generation implementation and it's not difficult to predict a revision that uses custom silicon instead of using a smartphone SoC per controller.

From my experience, only WMR had really terrible inside out tracking where it would make the value proposition of lighthouses obvious. Quest inside out tracking is good though.

The main advantage light houses offer is that it makes full body tracking possible, assuming people are willing to pay for 2-3 extra trackers AND more developers start supporting it. As of right now, I am only aware of 3-5 games and apps that support full body tracking.

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