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.

[dinoroger]

I tried the Vive yesterday at Dreamhack and was impressed with the controllers. No matter how close I got them to each other, overlapping, or angle they worked perfectly. Only when I tried to put them in my pocket and run out did they not detect. I was trying to recreate the Total Recall airport X-Ray gun scene with the chaperon system.

[SD-777]

Some new experiences to share.


Spell Fighter VR:  WOW WOW!  This is only a demo, but if you played vanishing realms and wished it had "real" graphics instead of being cartoon, then you have to try spell fighter.  It has realistic graphics, I didn't get far but so far had very nice looking skeletons/zombies.  I did make it into a dark house, while walking inside I had a couple of giant spiders attack me.  Combat is awesome, spell fighting is a bit clunky thought, but you do have swords, spears, bows, muskets, flintlock, etc.  Their physics worked very well with the wands. You can also choose your locomotion method, either by transport or by using the touchpad.  Using the touchpad was awesome, but you do get sick pretty quickly.  I just can't rave enough about this experience, but it's a very short demo.  This will be a surprise sleeper for the RPG crowd I bet!

Lucky's Tale:  So I downloaded the injector hack that lets you run Rift games on the Vive.  Lucky's Tale is ok, but I think it's highly overrated.  Firstly the graphics are terrible, they are literally almost exactly the same quality as Super Mario 64.  The game play is VERY reminiscent of SM64 as well.  Neither of these things are bad, but not something I expect in 2016.  I understand they wanted to get the flavor of a classic game, but they really seem like they made no effort.  The VR aspect was very cool, but didn't really affect game play.  You still had all the same axis of motions as you would on any other 3d game like this.  Lastly I've realized how little tolerance I have for repetitive games which become even more repetitive when you have to do the entire level from the last checkpoint again.  I was hoping for more of a "full game" experience from this since it's their flagship.

I was thinking of trying Chronos as it looks really cool, but it really doesn't seem like it's worth $50, reviews say it's very short and quite shallow, but otherwise rave about it.  Eve Valkyrie I'm still waiting for my coupon to get it for free.  Project Cars also seemed expensive for what you get, and I'm afraid I'll get motion sickness with it.

Overall on the Vive versus Rift I'm leaning towards the Rift.  Room scale is incredible, but once the touch controllers are out I think we'll be able to do much more sitting/standing than we currently believe.  Spell Fighter tuned me into this, but still the issue of sickness needs to be resolved.  I'm frustrated with HTC support, 4 days to answer my ticket and then they throw a wall of very technical things to configure to get my broken base station working, this doesn't bode well for the general consumer market.  I'm also still annoyed enough with the huge cable where any reduction of weight and size will be welcome.  Don't know though, haven't decided yet.

[Zoomie]

Thanks for taking the time to write that up SpineDoc.  I'm seeing a lot of posts lately where people with both are choosing one or the other.  The encouraging part is that there doesn't seem to be a clear winner.  I say encouraging, because it can only be good for VR if both of these headsets are viable choices.  I really need to make a list of games and experiences I want to try once Touch releases.

[ThreeDeeVision]

Yeah, glad I don't have to choose.  I love both!