HTC Valve Vive virtual reality headset
When people put on a virtual reality
headset for the first time, they almost always try to do two things:
look at their hands and walk around. It’s a natural impulse, but an
ability VR headset makers have shied away from because of the technical
challenge and potential to make people sick.
If HTC and Valve proved one thing with their new Vive headset,
it’s that the technology is here to move around a whole room in virtual
reality. The Vive’s key is two joystick-like controllers, two boxes
that hang on the walls and the sensor-studded headset. They all work
together to place your location in the room, whether you’re walking,
crouching or waving your hands around. During a demo at this week’s Game
Developers Conference in San Francisco, I didn’t feel any of the
vertigo that came standard with my early VR walking experiences. My
steps and hand movements were always represented perfectly in the
virtual world.
Compared against the Oculus
Crescent Bay and Sony Project Morpheus headsets, Vive looks
the bulkiest. It sits on your head with a stretchy strap that makes it
feel similar to Crescent Bay. It’s a bit uncomfortable, but nothing
unbearable. The controllers, which have a trigger and touch pad, are
attached to a little fanny pack you wear around your waist, but they
will eventually be wireless.
The Vive’s 1200 x 1080 pixel display looked good, but didn’t feel quite as crisp as Sony’s Project Morpheus.
There was still a little bit of screen door — the effect where a fine
grid appears to lay over your vision — going on, but it was barely
noticeable once I got into the content. The 90 frames per second refresh
rate and 22 millisecond latency was enough for the viewing experience
to feel comfortable and natural.
I did just one demo in the Vive: WEVR‘s theBlu,
a mostly passive experience that places you on a shipwreck in the
ocean. I used the controllers to wave tiny fish away from my eyes and
then walked around the ship’s deck, which had rails and debris
corresponding with the walls in the real room in which my body stood.
I turned just as a life-size blue whale
began gliding past the ship’s bow. I was tempted to reach out and run my
fingers along the deep ridges in the mammal’s belly. It paused for a
moment as its eye came in line with my body and we stared, considering
one another. Then the whale swam away, its tail slamming into the deck
in the process.
I didn’t jump or shout during the
experience, partially because it’s getting harder to surprise me in
virtual reality. But the main reason is WEVR isn’t going for the cheap
shots (Sony’s The Deep demo, where a shark attacks you at the
bottom of the sea, comes to mind). I caught up with CEO Neville Spiteri
and senior vice president Anthony Batt after checking out Vive and they
explained how the company prefers content that draws people in through
empathy or awe than shock.
“It’s really hard to get a sense of how
big a blue whale is,” Spiteri said. You can go to a museum and see a
skeleton and it begins to dawn on you, but being there next to one in
virtual reality is a totally new level of understanding. That whale and I
had a moment together.
I went into the Vive demo expecting a lot. I’ve been talking to people all week about their experience with the headset, and the phrases “mindblowing” and “next level” have been thrown around generously. Vive has definitely set the bar for movement in VR, but its screen wasn’t good enough to convince me that Sony or Oculus are necessarily behind on other factors.
I’m interested to see more content
developed specifically for the headset. It’s a powerful new option that
will build on our most natural instincts when we step into virtual
reality: interacting. I felt naked when I did the official Oculus
Crescent Bay demo at GDC; without a controller of some sort, the
experience was lacking. Interactivity is the new norm.
Courtesy: Gigaom
