zamardii12
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2014
- Messages
- 3,415
Been reading through the threads and i'll give my impressions after having the Vive and playing with virtually all the best games on the Steam Store.
Setup:
The setup was super easy. Little work had to go into it to mount the lighthouses, and I had a little issue only that the space I had allotted for the system wasn't quite enough so I had to make more space. So unless you are just going to be using the Vive seated or standing, then make sure you have plenty of room. But other than that setup was a breeze as far as after mounting the lighthouses. The software is super easy and the tutorial instantly transported me into a completely different world. Admittedly, the Rift is easier to setup than the Vive but the Vive is a completely different experience altogether. You are literally setting up a virtual play space where you can walk around inside of a virtual environment which is completely different than the Rift. The Rift is great for seated experiences and that's it until the Touch controllers come out for it, but even then it won't be full room-scale as we know it with the Vive.
The HMD and comfort:
This is different likely for everyone, but I have been lurking in the Vive subreddit for a long time and there is a incredible community of people there who have shared some great information with me as far as making the experience better. The headset is by no means uncomfortable or heavy to me. The HMD itself is actually quite light, but without properly setting up the straps it can be front-heavy for some. I have found a surprising amount of great tips from fellow Vive users that have made the headset a lot more comfortable. The biggest tip that increased the comfortable-ness of the headset was that when you are putting on the strap around the back of your head, the cord tends to get pulled and get stuck when strapping onto the back of your head so when pulling the backstrap back if you push the cables up through the loop so there is some slack and THEN pull the back strap on then that actually brings a lot of the front weight to the back and the strap properly sits down further on the back of your head where your skull tends to come in or cup inwards. Once I realized this it has made a enormous difference in comfort. There are also a bunch of mods that people have attempted to make the HMD better too. For instance, one Redditor linked to a pair of sleeping masks that when cut to size attach to the velcro on the headset but also bring your eyes closer to the lenses which increases your FOV and makes reading text easier. I got the sleeping masks in the mail yesterday and tried it, and it does indeed help increase text readability as well as increase the FOV albeit with one caveat where I can see the edges of the Vive screen out of my eyes peripherals when looking straight. So my point is that there are ways to make the headset better, but this is not to say that without doing these things the headset is uncomfortable or worse in any way. No. Not at all. It simply makes something that is great even better. If you don't like tinkering with stuff like that then the headset is perfectly usable without it, but I highly suggest getting the IPD adjustment right as well as the straps. There are a bunch of tips and guides online on how to get the most out of the Vive in terms of fit and it's comfortable factor.
The Technology/Lenses
Okay, so this is the biggest point of contention that I see from other users. Could the resolution be better? Sure. Could the lenses be better? Sure. However, this is a first gen device. The display is not all that bad, and honestly most of the experiences are so great that I don't even focus on the pixels or anything else. I get immersed in the experience. Without a doubt every new generation is going to be great, but the display is a necessary compromise for many reasons. The biggest being the most obvious which is that not that many people (very few in-fact) have PCs capable of meeting the minimum specs required by the Vive and Rift to use their HMDs. If you want to sell to the most amount of people and try to bring a new medium in and make it a new standard while trying to have mass-market appeal so that developers will create games for your headset you need to have some sort of a trade-off. You have to remember that the Vive's panel is 2160 x 1200, and to maintain persistence and not induce nausea you have to run that resolution at over 90 frames per second consistently. There is no dropping below 90... or you could induce motion sickness in people. Not many people's computers can run a display that well let alone at high enough settings to make it look pretty too. Now, once we get to 4k displays in the headset then we will definitely have more of a "Retina" style display where the pixels aren't so visible as they are now but running 4K or even 2K at 90 frames a second consistently with decent quality settings is not something most people can do with their computers. $799 is already expensive for a VR system let-alone $599 for a Rift and then the $1000 needed for a VR-ready computer. Not to mention the space required for room-scale VR. The price of entry to this is quite high which is also a reason why it could be hard for most developers to sign-on for a while to invest in the platform. As if this moment estimates are that there are around 50,000 Vive users. VERY small number. What I am getting at is that this is a first-gen product intended to do the best it can at the price point that it is at. You get a incredible amount of tech for $799. I heard some people complaining about the camera which has actually been fixed and it mitigated if you go to the SteamVR settings and you switch the camera to 30hz instead of the default of 60hz. The microphone has also been patched and works a lot better. There is nothing cooler than having the headset on and getting a call and being able to talk to someone while still in VR, and being able to read and respond to text messages while in the headset too as well as be able to see and control your desktop whenever you want. The pass-through camera is a nice addition to be able to see something right in front of you, and "Tron" view is a cool feature so you can see the entire room in your field of view instead of on a small screen on the controller with the pass-through camera.
I also wanted to quickly add that the Steam integration with Steam VR is awesome. Having everything in one place is great, and launching and getting is started is literally just one click within Steam.
Obviously there is room for improvement, but honestly if you play the games and try to get into it you kinda don't really focus on the resolution anymore. And that's the idea as of right now. The experience of playing these games outweighs the screen-door effect and other nuances of the system. I am aware not everybody will be so easily able to ignore these "shortcomings," but it's also not for everyone. This isn't like buying a monitor for your PC. You really can't look at this the same way. I am super excited to see the next headset, but with the increase in screen resolution will come a heavy tax on performance and it's entirely possible that the new headsets will require a decrease in resolution for some and a higher tax on performance to get the full native resolution of whatever resolution will be on the next generation of HMD.
Games:
The games that are good are GOOD. And I am talking in terms of presence and the awareness that you are IN that world. The Gallery: Call of the Starseed is the most amazing gaming experience I have ever experienced. Albeit short and expensive, it is a perfect representation of how much room-scale VR is really the best experience when it comes to VR. Being able to interact with so many things inside of a world is literally mind-blowing and I can't wait for the next episode. Job Simulator is super fun and one of my favorites too with some great interactivity and good humor. Budget Cuts is another amazing example of how well VR works in room-scale. It is super fun pretending to be a secret agent, and moving around in ceiling ducts and throwing knives at the robots to get past... it's a blast and can't wait for the full version to come out. Final Approach is a wonderful game that takes a god's eye view of a airport and guide planes to land, take off, fly through balloons, bomb things... it's wonderful and I felt like a kid again playing it again. It was like having my own alive toy set... leaning down and looking at the little guys on the tarmac running around and doing their thing, seeing the planes flyby in front of me... Another great was is Out of Ammo. This is super fun. It's a mix of RTS and FPS. God view again, and you place your units on the map, and then waves of units attack. You can then "possess" any troop you want and use their gun in first person. It's super super fun. Especially the sniper. Aiming down the scope, pulling the hammer back, loading ammo by reaching down and putting it in. You can even call in 3 different types of airstrikes which are super fun to watch. I will say however that being that this is such a new platform the "good" games are rather limited. I still go back to playing some and replaying others. H3VR is a fun gun simulator that is currently Early Access, but definitely worth it. Zombie Training Simulator is really fun zombie shooter. Brook Haven Experiment is a wave-based shooter that works really well. Hordez is another VR shooter but more involved where you are slowly moved through corridors and can switch between different types of guns to kill zombies that could come from any direction. You can even use a Katana to slice them up which is cool. I am still playing through Final Approach and a handful of others. If you like Sim games, Project Cars is a amazing experience. I actually felt like I was moving. A steering wheel would make it a lot better, but I don't have the space so I am sticking to a controller but even that is fine. Waltz of the Wizard is a fun thing where you can cast spells and do some cool things and at the price of Free is super cool. So, there are plenty of experiences to be had out there with a lot more on the way.
The Future / Conclusion:
I could go on about this for forever, but in terms of the Vive I think there is a lot of good to be said. There are a few cons... it's expensive, the lenses and display could be better... but the Vive is like the first row seat of being able to experience something completely new for the first time, like getting on a roller coaster for the first time. It was pricey to get in, and cost you a lot to get there but now you are strapped in and you don't know what it's going to be like until you try. Which leads me to the fundamental problem with VR: explaining it to people. It simply needs to be experienced, and investing over $800 of your hard-earned money on something you can't try first is a heavy price to pay but I see it in terms of the level of enthusiasm I have had for this technology since we were promised VR to us as kids. Transporting us to different worlds where we could never go in real life, and where a television screen couldn't really suck us in. This is a entirely new and exciting medium that granted; is not for everyone however to ALL the people that I have so far demoed and showed this to all of them have been completely blown away. My dad over the weekend was able to experience riding on Apollo 11 and landing on the moon, my mom was able to travel beneath the ocean and come face-to-face with a whale. Ask anyone with a VR headset what their favorite part of owning a VR system is, and they will all tell you the same thing: showing it to others. Seeing other peoples' reactions to living out their life dreams like riding on a rocket, or my dad's favorite was shooting drones in Space Pirate Trainer with a laser gun. You see that wonder and amazement in other people. People at Oculus call it the "Oculus Face." Anyway, I hope this helped answer any lingering questions or concerns those of you have but I mostly just wanted to share my personal experience of ownership thus-far.
Setup:
The setup was super easy. Little work had to go into it to mount the lighthouses, and I had a little issue only that the space I had allotted for the system wasn't quite enough so I had to make more space. So unless you are just going to be using the Vive seated or standing, then make sure you have plenty of room. But other than that setup was a breeze as far as after mounting the lighthouses. The software is super easy and the tutorial instantly transported me into a completely different world. Admittedly, the Rift is easier to setup than the Vive but the Vive is a completely different experience altogether. You are literally setting up a virtual play space where you can walk around inside of a virtual environment which is completely different than the Rift. The Rift is great for seated experiences and that's it until the Touch controllers come out for it, but even then it won't be full room-scale as we know it with the Vive.
The HMD and comfort:
This is different likely for everyone, but I have been lurking in the Vive subreddit for a long time and there is a incredible community of people there who have shared some great information with me as far as making the experience better. The headset is by no means uncomfortable or heavy to me. The HMD itself is actually quite light, but without properly setting up the straps it can be front-heavy for some. I have found a surprising amount of great tips from fellow Vive users that have made the headset a lot more comfortable. The biggest tip that increased the comfortable-ness of the headset was that when you are putting on the strap around the back of your head, the cord tends to get pulled and get stuck when strapping onto the back of your head so when pulling the backstrap back if you push the cables up through the loop so there is some slack and THEN pull the back strap on then that actually brings a lot of the front weight to the back and the strap properly sits down further on the back of your head where your skull tends to come in or cup inwards. Once I realized this it has made a enormous difference in comfort. There are also a bunch of mods that people have attempted to make the HMD better too. For instance, one Redditor linked to a pair of sleeping masks that when cut to size attach to the velcro on the headset but also bring your eyes closer to the lenses which increases your FOV and makes reading text easier. I got the sleeping masks in the mail yesterday and tried it, and it does indeed help increase text readability as well as increase the FOV albeit with one caveat where I can see the edges of the Vive screen out of my eyes peripherals when looking straight. So my point is that there are ways to make the headset better, but this is not to say that without doing these things the headset is uncomfortable or worse in any way. No. Not at all. It simply makes something that is great even better. If you don't like tinkering with stuff like that then the headset is perfectly usable without it, but I highly suggest getting the IPD adjustment right as well as the straps. There are a bunch of tips and guides online on how to get the most out of the Vive in terms of fit and it's comfortable factor.
The Technology/Lenses
Okay, so this is the biggest point of contention that I see from other users. Could the resolution be better? Sure. Could the lenses be better? Sure. However, this is a first gen device. The display is not all that bad, and honestly most of the experiences are so great that I don't even focus on the pixels or anything else. I get immersed in the experience. Without a doubt every new generation is going to be great, but the display is a necessary compromise for many reasons. The biggest being the most obvious which is that not that many people (very few in-fact) have PCs capable of meeting the minimum specs required by the Vive and Rift to use their HMDs. If you want to sell to the most amount of people and try to bring a new medium in and make it a new standard while trying to have mass-market appeal so that developers will create games for your headset you need to have some sort of a trade-off. You have to remember that the Vive's panel is 2160 x 1200, and to maintain persistence and not induce nausea you have to run that resolution at over 90 frames per second consistently. There is no dropping below 90... or you could induce motion sickness in people. Not many people's computers can run a display that well let alone at high enough settings to make it look pretty too. Now, once we get to 4k displays in the headset then we will definitely have more of a "Retina" style display where the pixels aren't so visible as they are now but running 4K or even 2K at 90 frames a second consistently with decent quality settings is not something most people can do with their computers. $799 is already expensive for a VR system let-alone $599 for a Rift and then the $1000 needed for a VR-ready computer. Not to mention the space required for room-scale VR. The price of entry to this is quite high which is also a reason why it could be hard for most developers to sign-on for a while to invest in the platform. As if this moment estimates are that there are around 50,000 Vive users. VERY small number. What I am getting at is that this is a first-gen product intended to do the best it can at the price point that it is at. You get a incredible amount of tech for $799. I heard some people complaining about the camera which has actually been fixed and it mitigated if you go to the SteamVR settings and you switch the camera to 30hz instead of the default of 60hz. The microphone has also been patched and works a lot better. There is nothing cooler than having the headset on and getting a call and being able to talk to someone while still in VR, and being able to read and respond to text messages while in the headset too as well as be able to see and control your desktop whenever you want. The pass-through camera is a nice addition to be able to see something right in front of you, and "Tron" view is a cool feature so you can see the entire room in your field of view instead of on a small screen on the controller with the pass-through camera.
I also wanted to quickly add that the Steam integration with Steam VR is awesome. Having everything in one place is great, and launching and getting is started is literally just one click within Steam.
Obviously there is room for improvement, but honestly if you play the games and try to get into it you kinda don't really focus on the resolution anymore. And that's the idea as of right now. The experience of playing these games outweighs the screen-door effect and other nuances of the system. I am aware not everybody will be so easily able to ignore these "shortcomings," but it's also not for everyone. This isn't like buying a monitor for your PC. You really can't look at this the same way. I am super excited to see the next headset, but with the increase in screen resolution will come a heavy tax on performance and it's entirely possible that the new headsets will require a decrease in resolution for some and a higher tax on performance to get the full native resolution of whatever resolution will be on the next generation of HMD.
Games:
The games that are good are GOOD. And I am talking in terms of presence and the awareness that you are IN that world. The Gallery: Call of the Starseed is the most amazing gaming experience I have ever experienced. Albeit short and expensive, it is a perfect representation of how much room-scale VR is really the best experience when it comes to VR. Being able to interact with so many things inside of a world is literally mind-blowing and I can't wait for the next episode. Job Simulator is super fun and one of my favorites too with some great interactivity and good humor. Budget Cuts is another amazing example of how well VR works in room-scale. It is super fun pretending to be a secret agent, and moving around in ceiling ducts and throwing knives at the robots to get past... it's a blast and can't wait for the full version to come out. Final Approach is a wonderful game that takes a god's eye view of a airport and guide planes to land, take off, fly through balloons, bomb things... it's wonderful and I felt like a kid again playing it again. It was like having my own alive toy set... leaning down and looking at the little guys on the tarmac running around and doing their thing, seeing the planes flyby in front of me... Another great was is Out of Ammo. This is super fun. It's a mix of RTS and FPS. God view again, and you place your units on the map, and then waves of units attack. You can then "possess" any troop you want and use their gun in first person. It's super super fun. Especially the sniper. Aiming down the scope, pulling the hammer back, loading ammo by reaching down and putting it in. You can even call in 3 different types of airstrikes which are super fun to watch. I will say however that being that this is such a new platform the "good" games are rather limited. I still go back to playing some and replaying others. H3VR is a fun gun simulator that is currently Early Access, but definitely worth it. Zombie Training Simulator is really fun zombie shooter. Brook Haven Experiment is a wave-based shooter that works really well. Hordez is another VR shooter but more involved where you are slowly moved through corridors and can switch between different types of guns to kill zombies that could come from any direction. You can even use a Katana to slice them up which is cool. I am still playing through Final Approach and a handful of others. If you like Sim games, Project Cars is a amazing experience. I actually felt like I was moving. A steering wheel would make it a lot better, but I don't have the space so I am sticking to a controller but even that is fine. Waltz of the Wizard is a fun thing where you can cast spells and do some cool things and at the price of Free is super cool. So, there are plenty of experiences to be had out there with a lot more on the way.
The Future / Conclusion:
I could go on about this for forever, but in terms of the Vive I think there is a lot of good to be said. There are a few cons... it's expensive, the lenses and display could be better... but the Vive is like the first row seat of being able to experience something completely new for the first time, like getting on a roller coaster for the first time. It was pricey to get in, and cost you a lot to get there but now you are strapped in and you don't know what it's going to be like until you try. Which leads me to the fundamental problem with VR: explaining it to people. It simply needs to be experienced, and investing over $800 of your hard-earned money on something you can't try first is a heavy price to pay but I see it in terms of the level of enthusiasm I have had for this technology since we were promised VR to us as kids. Transporting us to different worlds where we could never go in real life, and where a television screen couldn't really suck us in. This is a entirely new and exciting medium that granted; is not for everyone however to ALL the people that I have so far demoed and showed this to all of them have been completely blown away. My dad over the weekend was able to experience riding on Apollo 11 and landing on the moon, my mom was able to travel beneath the ocean and come face-to-face with a whale. Ask anyone with a VR headset what their favorite part of owning a VR system is, and they will all tell you the same thing: showing it to others. Seeing other peoples' reactions to living out their life dreams like riding on a rocket, or my dad's favorite was shooting drones in Space Pirate Trainer with a laser gun. You see that wonder and amazement in other people. People at Oculus call it the "Oculus Face." Anyway, I hope this helped answer any lingering questions or concerns those of you have but I mostly just wanted to share my personal experience of ownership thus-far.