Price (as of the announcement – though add the touch controllers and extra trackers for room scale play and you are closing the gap)
Generally, I think people have a slight preference for the display (though they are pretty close)
A bit more comfortable (if you don’t wear glasses) and less bulky
Several games are Oculus exclusive (though there’s a workaround for Vive owners)
Touch controllers are superior to Vive wands
WHY VIVE?
Lighthouse tracking system is much better for room-scale play (Rift still working through issues with it’s tracking. It’s getting better, but the tracking tech for the Vive is just plain superior and will always be better at 360 room-scale with this generation of hardware)
Richer accessory ecosystem (trackers and an alternative headstrap are on the way; alternative touch-like controllers not formally announced but widely expected to be on the way; wireless on the way soon)
Better fit for those who wear glasses
Easier to deal with connections (Oculus requires 3 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0, I believe; the Vive is perfectly happy with 1 USB 2.0).
Steam ecosystem
Not Facebook (if that bugs you)
Not related to Palmer Luckey (if that bugs you)
Lastly, and it’s purely subjective: I feel like Steam is in this for the long-haul and has more of a gaming mindset than Oculus/Facebook. It feels like a better overall platform for the future.
No-brainer is probably overselling it, and I am obviously biased, but I’m glad the result of my own debate led me to a Vive.
I come out on the opposite side of the equation (I think Oculus is the better choice) but I think your breakdown of pro’s & cons is perfectly correct.
Earlier you touched on what for me is the major problem now facing VR, more than price or any other factor. It simply does not physically work for long form games.
Neither system allows players to comfortably enjoy a long game session (say more than an hour or two straight). It just sneaks up on you and “bleh” you start to feel ill, a headache or nausa or straps chaffing or you are standing or whatever but it just doesnt sustain.
Now you could argue thats no problem because long form isnt needed for a mass casual audience which is fine, but I need it, gamers need that for almost all genres they love and VR needs gamers in a big way to gain traction.
Yeah, I agree. Over time, more comfortable and higher resolution displays will mitigate that. That said, I have spent 2-3 hours in VR playing Elite, and didn’t want to stop. I miss the sharp graphics of my desktop, and wish the resolution was better, but I’m not interested in playing without that sense of presence and scale.
The Vive has some comfort issues (the design of the headstraps is a bit crap – their new one looks miles better). I also have a wonky shaped head and wear glasses which doesn’t help. I suppose I am willing to put up with a lot for the experience. Most consumers would not be. Seems like the Playstation VR is much better in this regard.
Most VR games are short-form, so don’t really put it to the test. I wouldn’t punch music notes in Soundboxing for 3 hours. I am curious how Fallout 4 VR will play in long sessions since it’ll be a more active game (not a cockpit sim).
It’s early days. Super exciting to see where it goes. Someday, I know I’ll be looking back at these gen 1 devices and marveling at how clunky and primitive they were, but I won’t regret the time and money spent.
I’m biased too as I don’t care much about room scale, and chose the Rift. I’ve used both systems, including setting up the Vive.
This is a bit … rich, listing as a pro stuff that isn’t out yet. :) How much Oculus stuff is also ‘on the way’, that you just don’t know about? They’re experimenting with gloves (and wireless I’m sure), the touch controller ships with an adaptor to use in upcoming Rock Band VR, they have in-ears to replace the on-ear headphones (Vive has none).
And Rift doesn’t need alternative headstraps and touch controllers as they kind of made them right first go… ;)
Easier to deal with connections (Oculus requires 3 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0, I believe; the Vive is perfectly happy with 1 USB 2.0)
Not really; it uses 1 USB for the headset and 1 per sensor, which is 3 in total if you have Touch. Whereas the Vive requires 1 powerpoint per base station instead. :)
If you were to do a plus and minus spreadsheet I think the Rift would destroy the Vive. However when I seriously want to play VR I usually gravitate towards the Vive. This is not what I expected given the plus/minus list but none of the Vive’s drawbacks really mean much once you are immersed. The big plus on the Vive side that makes all the difference is the rock solid tracking for room scale. Roomscale as it turns out is the big winner in VR, it’s huge, even with the cabling and other issues.
I need to pick up another sensor for the Rift so I have 3. Two is definitely not enough for roomscale. However I hate the idea of having to run a USB cable and all it’s length issues to the other side of the room, especially permanently.
I’ve spent a lot of time with both Vive and Rift and I prefer the Rift hands-down now that the Touch controllers are out. But I don’t need my reading glasses when wearing a headset.
On the tracking… It depends on how big an area you have. The two included sensors covered 95% of the angle doing room scale in my office, which is a smallish bedroom with two desks, so not a ton of room to move around in. An additional sensor is now down to $59, and plugging that in gets 100% coverage that’s as good as the Vive’s.
As for the Steam ecosystem, the Rift works fine with every SteamVR title I’ve tried, even ones that only claim to support Vive. The only title I had to hack was Google Earth, everything else just works out of the box.
They’re both good, But the Vive feels like an engineering prototype, with all of its cables, the more difficult fit and heavier headset, and the junction box–similar experience to my old Rift DK2. The lighter, more comfortable Rift CV1 feels like a finished product. They’re both fine products, but IMHO the only non-political reason not to go Rift over Vive is if you wear large glasses that don’t fit well in the Rift.
Also, of interest to owners of either headset, you can get prescription lenses for your VR headset now.
Oculus does and it is glorious. But see my comment about long play, you do need to take regular breaks. That aside Elite is AMAZING in oculus. Never played Elite with Vive (I have played other titles) but the store page says it works with it. My hunch is that the slightly worse Vive screen would have a big negative impact with Elite, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, it looks really good. I would have some mild concerns about the non-fresnel screens and how blurry it is outside of the sweet spot, but I’m sure that’ll get refined prior to release.
I won’t be buying it because it’s a bit too soon for me, and it’s a bit of a Vive 1.2, but I’m happy to see other companies diving in and pushing things forward. That’s the advantage of opening the technology up to third parties.
In the meanwhile, I am hoping my Vive achieves some comfort parity with its new headstra this summer.
Thought this was interesting as a possible breakthrough in VR.
As the article points out, wasd+mouse look was by no means an obvious breakthrough. Whether this holds up in preventing sickness will only be known after it’s released to a large amount of people but I am eager to test it, since teleportation is really the only solution that’s 100% for me right now and it’s far from ideal for certain game types.
I have been meaning to try Climby given it has more than a few fans. It’s also similar in some respects to The Climb, which I can play for hours without getting sick. Not having played either I don’t know how similar they really are but the devil is in the details. For example there were more than a few attempts at a wasd+mouse system before Marathon nailed it. On the surface they look similar but in practice one was clearly the way to go.
For locomotion like this there are a lot more variables than that simple control scheme, including constricting the viewpoint, blurring, lines of motion, etc. So it may take awhile to nail something down.
Or it may never work well and I might always suffer from location issues and be limited to teleportation.
If you’ve seen the trailers for the upcoming movie The Belko Experiment, there’s a free VR escape room game on Steam now based on it. http://store.steampowered.com/app/600140/
[quote=“Desslock, post:876, topic:77265”]
Which do you recommend for Vive/Oculus? Any for psvr yet?[/quote]
AeroflyFS 2 is in Early Access on Steam right now, but it’s absolutely gorgeous. On the combat front, DCS is great in VR. The latest iteration of IL-2 is supposed to add Vive/Oculus support in the next few weeks, so we’ll finally have something set in WW2.
There’s also FlyInside, which lets you play FSX, Prepar3D, and X-Plane in VR. I have the Prepar3D version and it’s very slick.
For Space, Elite is the only one I’ve spent much time in. And yes, you can play the full game, but as Rod says, you’ll want to take periodic breaks.
No idea on PSVR; I was this close to picking one up when I found out about the issue with lack of HDR passthrough. Really don’t want goggles I have to get behind my console to hook up every time I want to use them.
Denny can you clearly read the MFDs in the A10 or in the commercial jets with glass cockpits? How do you interact with in plane displays with a VR set on?
In DCS you have a ‘zoom’ button which you can use to get closer to instruments you can’t read, rather than physically leaning closer all the time.
There’s an in-cockpit mouse pointer you control with your head, so you can manipulate switches and dials by looking at them and using left-click and mouse wheel, which you map to the HOTAS buttons.
Yeah, I highlighted that concern in the PSVR thread because I was very disappointed to discover it, although it did get press coverage that I apparently missed. Definitely means that the PSVR won’t remain hooked up generally and if I devote time to a VR game I won’t swap back and forth. HDR makes a big difference in games like Uncharted 4 and Horizons Zero Dawn and that will probably to matter more in the future.
Thanks very much for the informative post on VR sims! Rod too. I’d really like to get back into flight/space sims and it seems like the genres are emerging from a pretty fallow period.
