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.

[Chewie71]

Edited this post to say, "forget it". It's not worth arguing with anyone. I'm glad everyone is happy with their Vive. I'm glad everyone is happy with the Rift. Happiness all around. 🙂

[Zoomie]

@Chewie71, there are reviews like this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4hu6ya/rift_and_vive_image_comparison_in_virtual_desktop/
where people have preferred the Rift optics over the Vive.  There are so many reviews on both sides of the fence that it's easy to find support for either argument.  At this stage in the game it's like justifying behaviour from the Bible - you can probably find a passage somewhere to justify pretty much any argument you want to make. 
I only post it to show that Zenbane isn't just talking out his ass 🙂

However, we can just as easily find a review like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4hz91w/another_post_from_an_owner_of_rift_and_vive/
where the owner is much less enthralled with the Rift's optics.  In this case he still says Rift has better clarity, but the 'god rays' are enough to swing his vote towards the Vive overall.  I don't find god rays that disruptive personally, but maybe I'm overly tolerant or got lucky with especially good Fresnel lenses.  For the record, my Rift also has minimal red mura.

From what I've read and seen personally, the Rift does have a large area in focus and excellent pixel density near the center of view.  It comes at the cost of more pronounced god rays and a smaller FOV than the Vive - from what I've heard.  In my case I enthusiastically chose Rift over Vive because of optics.  However, I don't own a Vive so feel free to discount my opinion if it doesn't agree with your experience.

[Chewie71]

Happiness to all. Peace and love, peace and love.

[SickleFoot]

I wouldn't let it put you off. Unfortunately anything mass produced is going to have failures. It just completely SUCKS when it happens to yourself.

A lot of the content out there is short and some of it expensive for reasons mentioned above, but keep at it. You will truely find something that amazes you. Not to mention, it's still early days. Just think what may be around the corner waiting to be announced.

[AnotherCrazyCan]

Glad to hear that you had a good time, and thanks for the thorough review. Please let us know how the rift compares when it comes in!

[Trilby]

"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."

Wow, breakdown in just one day?  Kinda scary, all the anticipation and it finely arrives only to break before you've really had a chance to play with it.  I sure hope it's something simple, like the nail got in the way...

[Zoomie]

When I first heard about Lighthouse technology, I incorrectly assumed it was an oscillating mirror of some kind, rather than a rotating flywheel assembly.  I wondered about durability since it has a rapidly moving part (3600RPM) but the answer was that MTTF on these units was somewhere in the range of several years after continuous use.

All new technology will have teething pains, but hopefully these early Lighthouse issues are few and far between.  It's pretty ingenious tech.  For anyone who wants to understand it better, this is a really good technical explanation of the system:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/General-Tech/SteamVR-HTC-Vive-depth-Lighthouse-Tracking-System-Dissecte...

[Oblongship]

SpineDoc said:

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.

Hey man, thanks for sharing this.

Would love to hear more about your experiences with more time invested.

[SD-777]

Zoomie said:

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.

Thanks, for some odd reason I just came home for lunch and the 2nd light house was working!  Odd, but  now I'm afraid to reboot it or unplug it.

I think the cost factor is mainly for the longevity of the game.  I don't mind paying $60 for 50-60 hours of gaming, but $30 for 2-3 hours is not great.  But then again I will occasionally spend $13 per person to go see a movie so I suppose it's all relative.  I do wish I could enjoy VR with the family though, I guess that will be the future, multiple linked headsets.

[Aekero]

SpineDoc, thanks for an actual unbiased first impression, so sick of "omg so cool way better!" "reviews" from people who don't even have both headsets.

Touch needs to happen for Rift, absolutely. I'll be jealous of your controllers til then. 😉