Conan48 talks about his Vive experience and raises some excellent points about the effectiveness of teleportation vs thumbstick control.
My Vive Review. Is room scale a big deal right now?
submitted 9 hours ago by conan48
I've tried the DK1, I've owned the DK2, Gear VR, and now the Vive.
I'll get the technical stuff out of the way: Comfort - It's good but not great. It's a little front heavy and during room scale sessions you can definetely feel it pulling down especially when the game requires you to look down and when moving quickly from side to side you can feel it moving around. I've gotten the straps to my liking and have the back strap at the base of my skull which really helps distribute the weight. I've spent 3-4 hour sessions and it's pretty good overall. I don't think most will have too big of an issue with the comfort.
Optics/Visual quality - SDE is most definetely noticeable, I'd say it's slightly better then the Gear VR, and a nice upgrade from the DK2. People saying pixels are not visible most likely are using the Vive without their glasses. LOL. There is still lots of improvement needed before SDE really becomes a non issue for me. (damn u 4k OLED monitor/TV)
The Fresnel lenses cause "god rays" and they appear like smudges or fog on the lens and you can clearly make out the ridges of the fresnel lens in the light bleed.
Also, I'm not happy that they haven't solved the black smear and instead have opted to remove one of the greatest benefit's of the OLED panel, TRUE BLACK. Remember those awesome moments from your DK2 when out of the blackness suddenly a world appeared? Forget about it on the Vive. Everything instead is grey and looks more like an LCD backlit panel. I'd actually prefer black smear over grey blacks! There are scenes like the one from the BLU where everything should be pitch black before some glowing jellyfish illuminate the scene, but instead we are standing in a noisy grey environment. Boo!
I really hope that next gen the resolution gets a noticeable bump as it's too low for me. While I can generally forget about the lower res when I'm immersed in a game, it's still painfully obvious. Setup - Not to bad, had to experiment with a few postions in my basement and couldn't quite get the light house stations to sync with each other and had to use the sync cable. I have them ceiling mounted at a downward angle but I do have lots of crap lying around the basement but took down a bunch of pictures but the windows may still be interfering with the lighthouse sensors as sometimes it can get pretty wonky and I lose tracking of one of my controllers. I'm not gonna knock the Vive for this as it may very well be just something in my setup. Most of the time the tracking is spot on and truly one to one with all my movements. I've got a pretty nice area to play with at 13' x 15'.
Roomscale - Awesome, and annoying. Sorry but I'm gonna focus on a few things that bother me about room scale in this review, but I'll start with the positive first 🙂
Taking your first steps in VR with fully tracked motion controllers is a freaking amazing experience. You are their! It's your own mini personal holodeck. I loved how walking around I literally could not get to close to edges as I was afraid I'd fall, or I'd step over stuff that wasn't really there, or I'd try to kick stuff.....when can we get trackers for our feet. LOL.
Walking around robot repair was such an amazing experience. I loved how the room felt so real and being able to walk away from the robot when he comes through the door was epic. Loved playing Xortex. Controlling that little ship with your hand and then walking around the room avoiding lasers and plasma balls was so much fun. Hope they make this into an entire game. Unseen Diplomacy was one of my favourite experiences on the Vive. It really felt like you were in a room and trying to escape. Getting on your hands and knees and crawling through ducts and avoiding lasers was really fun.
The pattern here is that Roomscale is working for me when the game or experience is confined to a single play area or room. Locomotion by using blink/teleport completely ruins any sense of immersion and so does the chaperone bounds that are almost always popping up, even with my larger playspace. I'm constantly being reminded that "Hey, your in a game!"
The cable is also a pain in the ass for me it's always getting tangled from me turning. Because I'm using almost the max available space, a few twists in the cable and it's pulling on my head and I have to take off the headset and untangle it. The in ear headphones that I use also get tangled up in the mess of wires in the back and keep falling out of my ears, and decided to just use standard cans, which or course add alot more to the weight already on my head.
I'd actually rather play a game that was standing 360 with NORMAL locomotion input like an analog stick. Here's why; when I'm playing a game like The Gallery, or Vanishing realms, you really can't take more then a few step before you hit the chaperone bounds and whats frustrating is that sometimes you are like a foot away from grabbing something and you have to teleport just to reach the item. I also don't like the fact that when you reach the edge of your play area, and you teleport, you are still at the edge of the play area and have to walk back to the center CONSTANTLY. T ravelling with teleporting again ruins all immersion, and you are not really "exploring" anymore but just jumping ahead over and over. Ex, in Vanishing Realms, you might need to traverse a large expanse of area, so you either point to a location very close to you and teleport in small jumps or you can teleport long distances and skip a lot of the game area. Walking through an entire area is a no go! Even if you have the full 15 x 15 max area, you will be forced to constantly blink to get anywhere unless you want to walk a few step blink and then walk backwards or you can pause the game to recenter yourself after every blink. IT SUCKS. I really hope they come up with something else or just use rooms scale for smaller experiences.
I'd much prefer to actually walk around with an analog stick (hate using the Vive track pads for walking as well) and explore the world more naturally and then maybe jump into room scale for fights, or puzzle solving, etc I can't get a sense of presence for more then a few seconds with the Vive. Sustained presence is not possible for me with the chaperone system and teleporting, and also the constant awareness of the cable.
My number one priority is feeling like I'm in the world, and sadly Room scale is not really doing it for me in it's current implementation, when used with games where moving large distances is required.
Where Room scale does work very well is when you are "confined" to an area that equals your playspace. Games like Audioshield, Brookheaven Experiment, Space Pirate Trainer, Unseen Diplomacy, etc work so well because you are basically playing in your space, your holodeck and you don't need to traverse long distances. The problem for me is that these kind of games get boring after a few hours. I want the atmosphere, the exploration, the feeling that I'm walking through another world.
My greatest experience in VR to date was Alien Isolation on the DK2. I felt like I had actually walked the space stations, and survived the Alien Encounters. Thinking about the game, it felt more like a memory or dream then a game. I can still vividly recall being aboard those ships, and I can still remember things in great detail, like I'd been their myself. I can get lost in a game like that because there is nothing to REMIND ME THAT I'M playing a game every few seconds. Of course I know it's not real, but I can be "tricked" into much longer periods of presence with a good seated controller VR experience.
I think people proclaiming how superior Room Scale is to seated VR and how seated VR is inferior are just in the honeymoon phase, and there is nothing wrong with that! But I've already noticed that many of the room scale games are very shallow and honestly will not hold my interest for more then a few weeks. I want games with some MEAT, some content. I want to play games like Soma (please do yourselves a favor and check out this game) in VR, where I'm traversing the depths of the ocean while human machine hybrids are looking to kill me, and I have atmosphere, and a great story to go along with it. Much of the current Vive lineup is like "look at me" cool concepts but full games these are not!
I'm not a Vive hater or Oculus fanboy (don't even have a CV1 yet) but I really hope that we see some games that really push the narrative, and immersive potential of VR with full experiences that are more then demos.
Yes, it's the early days of VR, but we really need to start seeing some great content soon. The worst thing possible would be for Steam or Oculus to get flooded by shoveware and the average Joe is just not gonna wanna sift through to find something good. Something similar happened with the Wii, where motion controls were cool, but eventually it faded fast because the content was mostly rubbish. I'm not saying VR is a gimmick, because it most certainly isn't but crap software can relegate it to a dust collector pretty quickly after the initial buzz wears off.
I actually think that the The Sulon Q or future generation of Gear VR will be true walking or Room Scale experiences. Completely all in one units that don't require a PC or cables. Go outside into your backyard or a field, warehouse, etc and walk the entire game! especially with redirected walking. Carmack is a genius for focusing on mobile VR as if you have any imagination, you can see how crazy awesome it will be in the coming years... and it will most likely be the standard for VR when GPUs get smaller and smaller and smaller...
