Just got back from PAX 2015, and one of the highlights was the plethora of VR demos. The HTC Vive in particular was fantastic, and really shows off the strengths of VR.
First off, the tech specs. The headset has a decent 2160x1200 resolution–although you can see the pixels, it’s enough that it’s not distracting. More importantly, the headset runs at 90 Hz, which is really nice in terms of reducing lag and improving “presence”. The high frame rate really makes the thing feel solid.
The real selling point, though, is the excellent full-room positional tracking. Two infrared lasers track the headset and two controllers to millimeter precision within about a 10x10 foot room. It works great, and changed my whole perception of VR–I now consider excellent position tracking an absolute necessity. It has to be fast, precise, zero lag, and cover at least a good sized room. VR that consists of sitting in a chair is completely lame in comparison, and frankly no longer deserves the moniker of “VR”.
I saw six different demos:
TheBlu: You’re standing underwater on a sunken ship. Fish and other creatures swim around you. Just a really nice, ambient experience. No interaction but you can wander around the deck a bit. Eventually a huge whale passes by–I instinctively ducked when the fin passed over my head, since it felt to be the size of a large surfboard. The whale looked the size of a bus, and had fantastic detail.
Job Simulator: You assemble “food”. Fun and cartoony. Not my favorite demo but amusing enough, and demonstrated the excellent position tracking of the hand controllers. You pick up bread, eggs, etc. and assemble it.
Tilt Brush: A cool 3D painting program. The controllers appear in VR space as these kind of holographic tools, and you use the touch controls to select the tool that you want. You can paint a fully 3D object, walking around it to get it right. I made an Eiffel Tower, though it kinda sucked.
Aperture Robot Repair: A cool Portal-themed experience. You’re in a repair room with tools, drawers, etc., and Atlas from Portal comes in to be “repaired”. GLaDOS makes an appearance and is very imposing.
The Secret Shop: Basically the shop from DotA. You can “teleport” to different runes, and you shrink down to be a few inches tall at each location. A tiny spider becomes huge. You can walk to the edge of a stone arch and it feels like you’re on a massive bridge. You can read a piece of paper that you’re standing on.
Call of the Starseed: Basically a simple adventure game. Introduces the “blink” mechanic, where you can teleport your room to different parts of the world. I thought this was a great solution to the problem of having a large world to navigate. Instead of moving your character in the traditional way (using a joystick or holding a button to move forward), you use the controller to teleport the room to a new location. The old one fades out and the new one fades in, and you can then navigate a new 10x10 foot area. Importantly, there’s no visual movement, and hence no motion sickness effect.
The puzzles were simple but it was a lot of fun interacting with the world, like picking up some roman candles and holding them in the fire. Moving around the room space was very inviting–at one point, I got on my hands and knees to look inside a pup tent. I could have just walked on top of it, but it felt like I needed to get lower so I could poke my head in the door, the way I would in reality.
All in all it was a lot of fun. There are still some problems–the headset still has a cable, for instance. It really needs to go wireless. And their setup with the lasers seemed expensive, so it’ll be important for them to get the cost down. But right now it seems they’re way ahead of Oculus Rift.