The Good The HTC Vive offers a flat-out amazing virtual reality experience with sharp visuals, great motion controls and full-room sensing to walk around in virtual space. The Bottom Line Vive is the best virtual-reality experience you can have right now, thanks to its motion controls and room-scale tracking. A wall. Much like the Oculus Rift - the best known virtual reality system out there - HTC Vive runs on high-end gaming PCs. It's tethered with long cables that run to that PC. But Vive also adds the hardware to interact with spaces with your hands, and to walk around too. A pair of motion controllers and two light-emitting boxes turn a space of your own into a mapped grid.
How does the HTC Vive work?
Like other virtual reality headsets, the Vive has the arduous task of completely immersing you in a video game by producing two images simultaneously. There are 72 of these dots speckling the controllers and helmet that help accurately track the Vive.
Inside every box is a Vive headset unit, two controllers, two base stations, a cloth to wipe down the lenses, a small hub that sits between the headset and your PC, charging cords for the controllers and power cables for base stations.
What it offers that Oculus Rift doesn't (yet)
For $800 (£689 in the UK and around AU$1,340 including shipping to Australia), the HTC Vive offers a complete motion-tracking headset, two wireless motion controllers, and two small, whirring, laser-emitting boxes that scan your room and create the bounds of your motion-tracking virtual play space. View full gallery
Vive is a collaboration between electronics company HTC and PC game software publisher Valve. Valve's Steam PC store and platform is what drives Vive.
Gearing up
Vive's headset is huge and bulbous, and it looks like a spider head. The Vive's tether is very, very long: about 15 feet (4.5 meters). The Vive's controller-wands are very good, and a little oddly shaped. In the game Job Simulator, they become disembodied white-glove cartoon hands.
Room-scale VR, and the cage of reality
Vive can work while standing still or sitting as with the Oculus Rift, if you wish, but the Vive can also expand out to allow full-room VR.
Oculus Rift vs. HTC Vive: Virtual reality headset showdown (8:29)
HTC Vive
The song ends and I take off the HTC Vive virtual reality headset. Adam Patrick Murray
And then HTC unveiled the Vive. Valve fed Oculus its VR research for free, and many of Valve's top VR heavyweights eventually left to go work in-house at Oculus.
As with the Rift, the Vive is a virtual reality headset. At the same time, we'd hear rumors about Valve's VR Room.” An entire room for VR. It's a key feature of the Vive—sort-of.
An early version of the Vive's Lighthouse sensor.
The concept is similar to the Oculus's camera—and, in fact, you can use the Vive like the Rift as a stationary, seated VR headset—but the range on the Vive is a fair amount larger. Job Simulator, an HTC Vive launch title.
Now, does that mean the Vive is perfect? Oculus Rift on the left, HTC Vive on the right.
Ready to launch
Valve's done...well, what Valve does. You want to sell and/or give away a Vive game? Steam's current Vive lineup reminds me of the early days of Oculus Share, a sprawling and lawless Wild West full of some of the most boundary-pushing, brilliant VR experiences possible. The other issue with Vive development at the moment is harder to solve though: Space. It's not an issue for every game, or even most games. Valve's implementation of refunds for Steam games starts to look prescient.
The Vive is the next step. Truly inhabiting a space. With the Vive, Valve and HTC have created what's currently the most forward-thinking VR headset on the market.
HTC Vive
- Room-scale VR is incredible at enhancing experiences
- Vive controllers borrow liberally from Steam Controller, with excellent results
- Headset design not as comfortable as Oculus Rift
- Space most people don't have.
Virtual Reality - SteamVR featuring the HTC Vive
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