New VIVE owner!! First impressions.

[SD-777]

Just got my Vive last night, my Rift preorder is still delayed until mid to late June.  I didn't play with it too much, but my impressions so far are good, but not mind blowing.

Setup was very easy,  not sure why some reviewers complain.  Download the software, plug all the cables, setup the 2 receivers and you're done.  The hardest part is probably moving any furniture to make an open space.  I'm terrible with measurements and didn't realize just how big a space room space needed, even a small space like 2x2m is fairly large.  But it's worth the tradeoff.

I didn't have much time after setup to play, having a 4 year old, a wife who had to get up early and company sleeping over.  I just loaded the first thing in Steam, which was The Brookhaven Experiment.  This is a first person shooter, but I think it's more of a demo at this time. 

First impressions was the Vive hardware is excellent.  Very nice fit and finish, and the headset was not heavy in the least.  The way the straps sit are not so much behind your head, but towards the top of it, and this balances out the weight of the headset quite nicely.  I do have gripes though.  The cable is pretty thick, it doesn't bother me at all if I'm standing still, and even moving isn't bad, it's when you have to do any kind of rotation at all where it gets to be a pain.  So walking around, if I had to double back I'd have to worry about it twisting behind my head, and then worry about stepping over it.  The cable was a HUGE immersion breaker and IMO will be one of the hurdles before VR becomes mass market.  IMO if VR is wired it continues to be a tech demo for tech enthusiasts.  The Rift will have the same issue, but having only a single cable is probably much nicer.  The other gripe, which I d idn't think I'd have, is the lack of earphones.  There is a cable you can plug earphones in, but it's annoying every time you take the headset off you have to fiddle with the earphones.  Another plus for the Rift.

Upon putting on the goggles my first thought was, hey I have goggles on.  I'm not sure how to describe it, but I thought I'd be fully immersed rather than seeing the goggle outlines.  So it felt as if I was in a virtual world, but wearing goggles.  Obvious?  Yeah I know it is.  This effect definitely lessened the longer I wore the headset and I hope will just fade away as my brain ignores it.  Lens quality was great, I do see pixellation but am not sure what the big deal is.  But then again I'm used to my GearVR which has major pixellation.  Anyhow I'm ok with it, but I'm an old school gamer and was ok with DOOM when it came out.  I'll gladly take the graphics hit to be in VR.  No light bleed on the headset.  Brightness was decent.

The only game I played was The Brookhaven Experiment, which was more of a tech demo.  It was very cool, you really felt as if you were in a deserted field with zombies running at you.  The touch controllers were freakin awesome, you had a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other.  I'm sorry, but anyone who says the Rift will have a better experience with an xbox controller is nuts.  Raising the flashlight to shine it on a sound I  heard, suddenly seeing a zombie sprinting towards me, and then lifting my gun to shoot it is just amazing.  There was no movement in the game other than within my home space, and rotating and such.  Graphics were meh, but once again we are in the first generation here.  Textures were flat and sparse.  The floor, for example, was just a single texture kind of tiled around and the floor and grass looked very fake, BUT I am ok with that because I was actually in that world.

Oh one final thing, the whole setup is very buggy.  At times the headset stopped working with a red light, and I had to research on the internet it seems there are issues with the HDMI port of some of the GTX cards.  I also had to disable some Vive marketing program on my startup menu, which I have no idea why but it fixed my issue.  The headset and controllers seemed to lose tracking quite frequently, but my receiver setup was far from optimal.  Actually I'm quite impressed with the tracking seeing how goofy  my receiver setup was.  One receiver was on top of my PC monitor, the other one was on the other side of the room about 20 ft away and quite a bit higher on an armoire.  My room space was very long but narrow.  This was all because I set it up so quickly just to play with it.  I plan on moving some stuff around, and wall/ceiling mounting the receivers so this should be much better.

Anyhoo, just some general first impressions.  I'll get to play a lot more with it tonight and tomorrow and I'll post up some more impressions.

[benplace]

Why don't you head over to the Vive forum to post this?  Not sure why people keep posting Vive reviews in the Oculus forum...I could see if its a comparison review...

[Zenbane]

Pixelation issues can be ranked as follows:

Gear VR --> Vive --> Rift

I've tried them all and own the Rift. I think there's room for all VR gear, but I also think it's important to be honest about their differences.

[SD-777]

Zenbane said:

Pixelation issues can be ranked as follows:

Gear VR --> Vive --> Rift

I've tried them all and own the Rift. I think there's room for all VR gear, but I also think it's important to be honest about their differences.

Yep I agree.  I'll look into it with my own eyes.  I do have a Gear VR and the difference isn't even close.  The pixilation on the GearVR is very apparent, versus just mildly noticeable on the Vive when I first put it on, and then fading to nothing after a few seconds of playing.

[zork2001]

The Lab is definitely the first thing every Vive owner should
load up and try. Everything is very polished with tons of VR experiences, it
really shows you what VR is capable of.

[rat8cheese]

Was going to wait until the weekend when work winds down to set up the Vive after picking it up yesterday.  Couldn't hold out so despite not having a power drill and not wanting to use Command Tape what I did was use 2 strips of command tape per base station.  That should theoretically hold 8 lbs but I also put a nail through the base station hole so if the tape fails when I'm not home hopefully it'll latch on the nail.  *pray*

With that said I loved up the Lab.  Spent a good 10 mins just messing around in the tutorial. Haha.  Only complaint is the text when the robot is talking is hard to read.  Didn't have time to mess with the SteamVR settings but is this just a resolution issue?   Anyone else notice it?  Might need to play around with the IPD knob.  

After that hat I tried Longbow.  Freaking amazing, but only 8 waves?   😞
next tried Xortex.   Now this game blew my mind.  The thumping techno and the orbs and lasers all over while you're literally walking around trying to maneuver your ship like you're 8 again playing with a model airplane in your hands.  So awesome!   Thought I was on a dance floor tripping on LSD.   Hahaha.   So again other than the text from the tutorial robot being blurry didn't notice any other problems when the games started.  With the lens moved closest to eye the FOV is better than the DK2 in my opinion.  Not sure about CV1 as mines not here yet.  Anyways just wanted to jot a few lines down have to get to sleep for work tomorrow.  Can't wait to try the other games and the bundled games.   

Btw, pirate trainer or zombie simulator?   I'm thinking I'll buy the latter but wanted some thoughts from people who've played both.  

Haha still can't stop thinking about Xortex.  That game is just awesome.   

[Zenbane]

Steam VR is a bit of a mess right now. I loaded it up using the Rift and it's a far cry from the apartment loft Oculus sets up for you. Although I assume Steam VR will improve just as the Rifts motion tracking and Touch are improved.

[rat8cheese]

Btw, how do I download backgrounds for the loading screen?   Right now I have it set on the museum with the soothing background music.  Do I download from inside the headset or via my desktop?   I know I saw a matrix theme and holodeck somewhere before on YouTube.  Thanks.  

[crim3]

Keep coming your VR experiences with any hardware. It makes for a good entertainment and eases the wait.

[SD-777]

Haven't had a chance to play much with my Vive, I think on off my lighthouses is faulty.  Spent hours trying to resolve it.  Poring over searches and I realized there are a lot of others with faulty lighthouses, mainly with the devs kits but some with the home release.  I'm waiting for tech support to get back to me, but I'm hesitant now to drop $800 on something that may not have great longevity. 

I did get to play Job Simulator for a while, although it had to be in seated mode because only one of my lighthouses worked.  Interesting, but seated mode sucked versus room mode, no comparison.  The game itself was extremely meh, I'm not sure why reviewers were ranting over it.  Very simplistic graphics, extremely simplistic game play, very shallow.  Yeah it was fun for a few minutes, but no more.  Who would pay $30 for this I'm not sure, I suppose I might to keep my 4 year old busy.  Looking through the current crop of games that's the feeling I got, that everything was overpriced and kind of seemed like a money grab.  But these are still very early impressions and I'm probably a bit bitter not being able to use both lighthouses.

[Zoomie]

Unfortunately the high price of software is something we're seeing for both Vive and Rift.  The limited market means more expensive per unit cost if developers are looking to recoup their costs.  As these devices become more common, the available market size will grow and prices should come down to PC / Console levels.  To be honest, we're lucky prices are staying as low as they are.

I hope you get the second lighthouse working.  The Rift is designed to work with only one tracker simply because that's all you get at first.  Lighthouse has the advantage of two units out of the box, but I'm surprised it's having trouble with only one station.  Is your HMD having major tracking problems, or are you just having issues with occlusion when you turn around (since there are no rear facing sensors on the Vive)?  My impression of the Vive is that it's more like an advanced Dev Kit whereas Oculus released the Rift as a more polished product that "just works". 

That's not necessarily a critique, just an observation.  Valve and HTC seem to be stuffing as much cutting edge as they can into the Vive, but at the cost of a bit of user-friendliness.  Here on the forum, we're mostly tech savvy and early adopters who dealt with Dev Kit issues with DK1 and DK2, so it's not a big deal if you have to update firmware to get your Wands working or if you have to troubleshoot one of your Lighthouse stations.

For the common (non techie) user, working correctly and easily out of the box is going to be increasingly important.  I think Oculus is nearly there but hopefully HTC learns their lesson from these early Vive consumers and refines their ease of use and overall stability.  Mass adoption is the key to VR success, so ease of use (and troubleshooting) is a big deal in the long term.