HTC Vive VR Kit Review

[HardOCP News]

After messing around with various versions of the device in the past, the crew at HotHardware have finally published their thoughts and impressions of the retail version of the HTC Vive VR kit. Overall a positive review.

We had experience with multiple versions of the Vive throughout its development cycle, but we thought playing with the retail version for only a few days wasn’t enough time to truly understand it, so we held off on making any final recommendations. We have, however, worked with the Vive for a number of weeks at this point, experimented with a slew of software and applications, and gave a handful of interested third-parties some time inside the Vive as well and think we’ve got a firm grasp of the situation.

 

[Inacurate]

Sad that PAX East is like the only place I know of where I could test VR equipment and I wasn't even able to attend this year!
Super bummed. But, maybe when it's more commercially accepted and adopted by consumers, retail stores will have some to test out...and grubby, grimy, disease infected headbands...which thankfully won't be simulated! LOL

 

[Nenu]

There are some excellent qualities with the Vive, the motion tracking is excellent, the tracked controllers work very well - Rift needs these now!, room based movement and the alert system is perfect imo.
But the optics are a beta product.

Only the very centre of the view is focused, the rest of it is blurred, and not the same for each eye.
It is extremely annoying and unpleasant.
Because it is front heavy, it has to be strapped on quite tightly.
But because different parts of a game or util require you to focus in different places, you end up either needing to have an elastic neck to look at exactly the right place or adjust the position of the headset on your head so your eyes focus on a different place.
This isnt so easy when its tightly strapped on.
Being so tight it leaves marks on my face that take some time to go away so I have to be careful when I use it.
Not that this matters much because I now strongly dislike using it.

Further issues.
You can clearly see the fresnel rings.
The FOV is wider than the Rift making the screen closer to your eyes. This makes it easier to see individual pixels and even the RGB elements! Not a good thing.
Its not easy to read text because it only focuses on a small area in the centre. You have to look straight ahead and move your head to track the words. This is very annoying when you want to quickly see a message or read something in the game environment. The res is so low that the lack of focus has a serious impact. There are other trickier situations where you have to zoom out to get adequate focus on something in the corner that doesnt move with your head.
Their are strong streaks wherever there are light/dark elements. These also seriously impact the ability to read anything off centre.
It hurt me to wear the headset for more than 1/2hr due to how tight it needs to be fitted.
The earbuds dont fit in my ears very well and keep falling out. Inserting them can get painful.

I tried Elite Dangerous and its broken on the Vive.
The image is jagged edged, it looks messy. Nothing like the reports coming from the Rift owners who are overjoyed with the experience.
I looked online for help and found that multiple threads about the problem are running because others have the same problem.
There is a promise it is being looked into but I didnt find any information that suggested they have a true handle on why its so bad.


My experience of their support is terrible.
Its taken them a week to respond to the 3 messages I sent and they ignored everything I said and gave me a generic email, so still no progress.
They insist you respond to them using a web interface with limited number of characters that are not enough to explain the issues.
This was an insult because I spent ages reducing my support request into something that could fit in the limited space, they took a week to respond and paid no attention to it.

Overall I am shocked at the state of the Vive.
Its not ready for release, its a beta product due to the optics and how uncomfortable it is.
And their support appears to be in beta as well.

I have used my friends Rift and it is light, comfortable, easy to use, has a much larger area of focus, doesnt have streaks all over the image, has great headphones that dont need to be inserted in your ear...
It is much better yet cost £250 less !!

Sorry.

 

[nepenthe]

There are some excellent qualities with the Vive, the motion tracking is excellent, the tracked controllers work very well - Rift needs these now!, room based movement and the alert system is perfect imo.
But the optics are a beta product.

Only the very centre of the view is focused, the rest of it is blurred, and not the same for each eye.
It is extremely annoying and unpleasant.
Because it is front heavy, it has to be strapped on quite tightly.
But because different parts of a game or util require you to focus in different places, you end up either needing to have an elastic neck to look at exactly the right place or adjust the position of the headset on your head so your eyes focus on a different place.
This isnt so easy when its tightly strapped on.
Being so tight it leaves marks on my face that take some time to go away so I have to be careful when I use it.
Not that this matters much because I now strongly dislike using it.

Further issues.
You can clearly see the fresnel rings.
The FOV is wider than the Rift making the screen closer to your eyes. This makes it easier to see individual pixels and even the RGB elements! Not a good thing.
Its not easy to read text because it only focuses on a small area in the centre. You have to look straight ahead and move your head to track the words. This is very annoying when you want to quickly see a message or read something in the game environment. The res is so low that the lack of focus has a serious impact. There are other trickier situations where you have to zoom out to get adequate focus on something in the corner that doesnt move with your head.
Their are strong streaks wherever there are light/dark elements. These also seriously impact the ability to read anything off centre.
It hurt me to wear the headset for more than 1/2hr due to how tight it needs to be fitted.
The earbuds dont fit in my ears very well and keep falling out. Inserting them can get painful.

I tried Elite Dangerous and its broken on the Vive.
The image is jagged edged, it looks messy. Nothing like the reports coming from the Rift owners who are overjoyed with the experience.
I looked online for help and found that multiple threads about the problem are running because others have the same problem.
There is a promise it is being looked into but I didnt find any information that suggested they have a true handle on why its so bad.


My experience of their support is terrible.
Its taken them a week to respond to the 3 messages I sent and they ignored everything I said and gave me a generic email, so still no progress.
They insist you respond to them using a web interface with limited number of characters that are not enough to explain the issues.
This was an insult because I spent ages reducing my support request into something that could fit in the limited space, they took a week to respond and paid no attention to it.

Overall I am shocked at the state of the Vive.
Its not ready for release, its a beta product due to the optics and how uncomfortable it is.
And their support appears to be in beta as well.

I have used my friends Rift and it is light, comfortable, easy to use, has a much larger area of focus, doesnt have streaks all over the image, has great headphones that dont need to be inserted in your ear...
It is much better yet cost £250 less !!

Sorry.

I would very much like to know if others are experiencing similar issues outside of Elite Dangerous. Frankly, I would just find it very hard to believe that such a fundamental design issue would exist between the Rift and Vive in terms of optics. Has there been no examples where say text is not blurry when using the Vive or Rift? Further, I wonder if this issue is related to the POV that each is is rendered from being the same.

 

[zamardii12]

I would very much like to know if others are experiencing similar issues outside of Elite Dangerous. Frankly, I would just find it very hard to believe that such a fundamental design issue would exist between the Rift and Vive in terms of optics. Has there been no examples where say text is not blurry when using the Vive or Rift? Further, I wonder if this issue is related to the POV that each is is rendered from being the same.

It's a known issue with Elite on the Vive. It has been discussed quite a lot on the Vive subreddit, and apparently the developers have mentioned they are working on it.

 

[dr.stevil]

cant wait to get my vive!!!! The wait is killing me lol

 

[TroubleMagnet]

You can read appropriately sized text on the Vive just fine. You're not going to be able to read small text on either one. The Vive does seem to have a smaller area in the center where you get max DPI than the Rift but it's not a huge difference. The lenses are the Rift are generally better, harder to see the fresnel ridges etc. but both are good. I ding the Vive more on not combining all the cables into one. The Vive is also less comforable to wear, Rift strap configuration and weight distribution is superior and makes it seem way lighter. The Rift headphones are also a better solution, far easier to deal with than Vive where you have yet another thing to put on (included earbuds are horrible, use your own) plus the Rift software manages to switch programs to output to the Rift headphones but on the Vive you have to go into audio devices and switch manually. The Oculus Home software seems more polished than Steam VR, really was not expecting that. I've had several crashes in Steam VR and maybe one in Oculus Home.

Right not the only reason to get the Vive is the controllers and the ability to do room scale VR. The controllers work really well, great tracking accuracy. I haven't really gotten much use out of the camera as it's super low resolution and I have it set to only turn on when close to the roomscale boundry. It might be more useful if you were doing seated mode.

One other thing to note is the lighthouse units blast IR everywhere and are set up to just stay on all the time. This stomps all over IR remotes so don't set them up too close to a TV setup or anything else using an IR remote.

Really looking forward to the Touch controllers coming out, hope they can get a large "room scale" coverage with the cameras. Hopefully they also fix the Oculus home to allow apps to be installed to different drives too.

 

[Vega]

Appropriately sized text? Text has to be HUGE to read it without eyestrain.

Also, the lighthouses turn on and off via SteamVR/Bluetooth.

 

[Nenu]

Appropriately sized text? Text has to be HUGE to read it without eyestrain.

Thanks Vega.
I bought VorpX and tried Alien Isolation.
Much of the text and information on the HUD is unreadable.
Its more or less pointless having certain information on the HUD unless you zoom out to see it, even then its not easy to read because you cannot view it dead in the centre.

A small positive that TroubleMagnet had a problem with.
There is an option to tell it which audio device to enable once a game/experience starts and another to select what plays audio once it has ended.

 

[TroubleMagnet]

Text size is relative, I can read the directions in Hover Junkers and other made for VR games just fine. Expecting to be able to read the text on the HUD for games that are NOT made for VR is not going to happen for this generation. HUDs for VR will need larger text and have more of the info moved to the center of the screen. The corners of the HUD harder to read in an HMD because your resolution drops off as you move away from the center.

I've mostly been playing made for VR games to avoid a lot of the conversion problems I already have had plenty of experience with on the DK1/DK2. I might give Elite Dangerous another chance but I really dislike their planes in space flight model. Oh, I've also messed with Virtual Desktop some, can't read anything on the 4K screen without getting REAL close.

I'll have to look into the options for Steam VR some more to see if I can get it to auto-switch, thanks. For Oculus it Just Worked, which was nice.

I could have sworn the lighthouse modules were still on when I went to move them last. Could have been it was after a crash and they didn't get turned off correctly, I know the HMD has been left on after some crashes. Their LEDs are definitely on 24/7 even if they spin down the mirror.

 

[Jewstein69]

The vive is what Oculus Rift should have been.

 

[Nenu]

The Rift is easily the better HMD, I know from experience, it isnt even close. The Vive isnt fit for sale.
The Rift is missing room space movement and tracked controllers but they are not essentials for many VR experiences.
I dont want a Rift though because of the EULA and Facebooks track record.

But saying the Vive is a better "HMD" than the Rift is either trolling, make belief, fanboyism or you have been bought.

 

[Miikun]

But saying the Vive is a better "HMD" than the Rift is either trolling, make belief, fanboyism or you have been bought.

That's quite disappointing, I was hoping the Vive would have better optics, after the blooming problem need on the rift. If only you could have a rift with lighthouse, and the native integration with Steam. I found the rift integration to be a bit annoying, for example the Xbox controller will time out if idle while using virtual desktop in steam then drops out of steam VR to Oculus whitescreen. Since most of my games are in steam, I was hoping for better news.

 

[Litfod]

I tried Elite Dangerous and its broken on the Vive.
The image is jagged edged, it looks messy.

Thanks to Oculus' clusterfuck of a launch I haven't had a Rift to compare it with so fortunately I haven't noticed those issues at all, and I've been playing it happily on the Vive almost every day for the last month, usually for hours at a time. So while I'm prepared to believe it might have issues compared with the Rift, "isn't fit for sale" is nonsense. I also don't find it necessary to have it uncomfortably tight. I had it quite tight at first because you initially assume it should be, but then found I could reduce the tension considerably without it shifting out of position when I move. As I said, I've often had it on for hours at a time. But I get it, you can't stand the optics or the ergonomics or the customer support. Fair enough.

The lack of motion controllers at launch from Oculus was a massive misstep IMO. They might not be necessary for things like Elite, but there are plenty of examples of games where they're a huge part of the experience. The fact that The Climb launched as a Rift exclusive was especially pathetic. It's not even a Rift vs Vive thing, it doesn't do VR in general any favours to hobble it right out of the gate. By the time they pull their finger out and release them, a lot of people will have moved on.

 

[Slinkycatz]

It is much better yet cost £250 less !!

I don't understand why you are trying to use this as an argument for the Oculus Rift.

The Oculus Rift is missing its controllers. How much do you think it's going to cost to buy those plus shipping? And isn't the fact that the OR doesn't even have those controllers ready when the Vive already has theirs ready a negative for the OR?

 

[Nenu]

Its an argument against the Vive.
The controllers wont cost £250 and I was about to pay another £100 for earphones because the in ear ones are a very bad choice, especially given the price.
And the major part of the VR experience is the display.
The Vive display is bloody awful. The Rift display is pretty good, certainly acceptable (res aside).

 

[Miikun]

I don't understand why you are trying to use this as an argument for the Oculus Rift.

The Oculus Rift is missing its controllers. How much do you think it's going to cost to buy those plus shipping? And isn't the fact that the OR doesn't even have those controllers ready when the Vive already has theirs ready a negative for the OR?

I'd be very surprised if it cost $250 for the controllers. The camera is the most expensive part since the touch controllers are passive, so they're little more than two wireless touchpads with a light ring, considering their power consumption (year or more before replacement with a mini hearing aid battery) it doesn't have a lot of electronics or even charging controllers/ports. The Camera is similar to a ps3 camera since the processing is all on the cpu, and not even binocular like the ps4 camera. But cost shouldn't be the primary consideration for the whole package, i'm happy to pay 10-20% more for the more capable and polished product i'm going to spend months using each year.

 

[Inacurate]

So many great comments in here from everyone.

I'm with Nenu on the Rift being driven by Facebook. I have no faith in that company. They'll probably drive 'social' gaming more than anything. We all know where Valve/Steam stands and that they're more likely to take a risk and stick with it, heh.wouldn't pull a 'Disney & Infinity' on us. But Facebook? Tough sell for me there.

Can someone suggest the 'best method' to trial VR in general, and not at a retail store kiosk, but in the comfort of my own home? I will have a PC with appropriate specs in near future.

The things they need to get correct out of the gate are the things they can't change post-sale, aka hardware.

Fit and comfort.
Optics.
Controllers.

Software can be polished, improved upon, fixed. But it sounds like the software for the Vive was the part focused on, while for the Rift it was hardware.

Anyone have serious playtime and wear glasses and have a comment on comfort levels?

 

[TroubleMagnet]

I think the Rift software is better but they are really fairly close. Steam VR just seems to crash a bit more.

Facebook has been very hands-off so far, I expect that to continue for the most part. They're going to try and get devs to sell though their store but so far that seems fine, plus is what Valve does already. As long as they are ok with programs like Virtual Desktop being able to launch from either I don't see a problem. I do expect FaceRoom or some other facebook connected app at some point but we can just not run it. Facebook knows they're a year away from being MySpaced at any time, that's why they're throwing so much cash at backup plans and next big things like Oculus.

Unless you can borrow a VR rig from someone I don't see how to get a home demo other than buy and return once they're available at retail.

I wear glasses and they work ok with the headsets but they do complicate taking it on and off. They are also prone to fogging some in a hot room. (No A/C in my temp apt. plus warm temps for Seattle area) I tend to just not wear them right now as one eye is only slightly fuzzy vs. with glasses in either HMD. I also did the Kickstarter for the frames that allow you to put your RX lenses in the HMDs. They have both Vive and Rift.

 

[Miikun]

Can someone suggest the 'best method' to trial VR in general, and not at a retail store kiosk, but in the comfort of my own home? I will have a PC with appropriate specs in near future.

The things they need to get correct out of the gate are the things they can't change post-sale, aka hardware.

Fit and comfort.
Optics.
Controllers.

Software can be polished, improved upon, fixed. But it sounds like the software for the Vive was the part focused on, while for the Rift it was hardware.

Anyone have serious playtime and wear glasses and have a comment on comfort levels?

Not at a kiosk would be buy from Amazon or BB and return it?

It's unfortunate that the closest EB Vive Kiosk is hundreds of miles away from me, unless BB started demoing them.

As for glasses, I think it depends on your glasses and how big they are. I've worn glasses with both the rift and gear VR but mine are pretty small. People have said the Vive is more roomy, though I'm not averse to wearing contacts for more comfort. Glasses though seen to help with reducing lens fogging for some reason, maybe the AR lens coatings on my glasses are preventing it.

 

[Nenu]

Can someone suggest the 'best method' to trial VR in general, and not at a retail store kiosk, but in the comfort of my own home? I will have a PC with appropriate specs in near future.

I wouldnt suggest the following unless you intend on keeping it.
ie dont do this if you are definitely going to return it because they cannot resell a return item as new, its not fair.

In the UK the Vive comes with a 2 week trial. Its actually law for long distance purchases so they have embraced it.
On their website they state you can use it for up to 2 weeks and you have 2 weeks to return it after that, but you must declare you dont want it in time and get it back to them in time.

By law in the UK they must refund all monies paid including shipping to your address but shipping it back to them is at your cost because they have stated that. The law allows this.
They can collect it and bill you or you can ship it yourself.
Its not that cheap even with the full refund because the shipping was £47.
If you have to pay for both way shipping in other countries thats quite a hit to try it out.

I dont know the policy for other countries nor how Oculus handle it.
You will need to research.