HTC Vive Pre takes the big picture – now is the time to pay attention to the details
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VR is getting real. On January 6, Oculus opened up pre-orders for the Rift, finally giving VR loyalists access to the consumer-grade headset. It’s on the CES show floor for everyone to see. A second Vive VR development kit, dubbed the Vive Pre, also showed up at the show, with a new front-facing camera, a lighter frame and a host of display system improvements. A consumer-oriented Vive, possibly very similar, will launch in April.
There is not much time left. So, the big question is: Are you ready? From my latest Vive Pre demo, I think HTC and Valve have the big picture. The new camera improves the difference between the Vive and the Oculus Rift — you can walk around wearing it. The picture quality on the headset is great. Tracking is very accurate. It’s virtual reality, and it works, which is no small feat. But that impression hasn’t changed much since my first try in April 2015, and this time I’ve focused more on the small details. I hope these little quirks and flaws are fixed before a wider release. There is still work to be done.
Example: The Vive Pre is still heavy. Since last year’s developer kit, the body has been redesigned to be smaller and lighter, although I can’t get any specific numbers from HTC. But within a minute of wearing it on my head, I felt a lot of pressure on my nose and neck. Ergonomics is a real challenge of perfection, and the Vive isn’t there yet.
The headset might be too heavy to be really comfortable, or it might need some delicate straps to get it to sit right on my head. Either way, I feel a heavy forehead. This is a problem Oculus has been grappling with for years, and I think its final design addresses it. The head-mounted straps and triangular support at the back of the head move the headset’s center of gravity back, which is essential for long gaming sessions.
It’s a nifty piece of hardware, if a little heavy.
But back to the Pre: The front-facing camera is important. What a big deal. Assuming the whole VR thing doesn’t collapse catastrophically before 2016, I’d like to see similar technology appear in Oculus Rift 2.0. With the camera and SteamVR’s “companion” system, Valve solves the problem of navigating real space while immersed in virtual space.
In the first Vive development kit, the Chaperone system uses predefined boundaries mapped during setup to prevent users from hitting walls or leaving a safe play space. In-game, this manifests as a grid of neon lights – think Star Trek’s holodeck (when it’s off), or the opening logo on any 80s VHS tape. The Pre’s camera adds to the Chaperone system the sparkling contours of everything in your field of view. Suddenly, you can tell exactly where people, walls, chairs, coffee tables, etc. are. You can read the basic outline of the text on the sign. My demo assistant put a chair in front of me and sat me down, which I did without removing the headphones.
This makes a lot of sense for VR because it means you don’t have to choose between a seated or standing experience and adjust your settings accordingly. You can have both. Your spatial awareness is still very limited — cameras and displays don’t give you the same peripheral vision as nature — but it’s a big step forward enough to safely navigate real-world environments in your headset.
This is the big picture. But again, it’s the details that count. At one point I was standing near a wall but not facing it, which caused the Chaperone system to stay in view and the surrounding semi-transparent outline squeezed into the game world. This distracted me and pulled me out of Valve’s delightful Portal demo, which led me to open up Atlas and start with his guts. I didn’t know the wall was behind me, so I don’t know why the overlay didn’t disappear. This problem will go away with experience, but I imagine long-term use will uncover other quirks that keep you out of immersion.
As useful as the camera is, it doesn’t solve the one remaining usability problem: cables.
As useful as the camera is, it doesn’t solve the one remaining usability problem: cables. Compared to the demo hardware I tried last year, the Vive Pre has a surprisingly neat, compact cable bundle. It’s light and easy to move. But it’s still a loose cable going from your head to your PC, and it’s still a tripping hazard. Without some sort of hoisting system, VR would be limited to walking carefully.
Another major area of improvement for the Vive Pre is its vision system, which includes a brighter display and some optical changes that HTC doesn’t want to go into detail about. But they tweaked the lens to give a clearer, sharper picture. I already thought it was the best game in town last year, and this headset is even better. But the difference isn’t as dramatic as the increase in resolution, as it is between the Oculus development kits. I need to use the Pre side-by-side with the original to really document the differences in detail.
Image sharpness is especially difficult to judge in VR demos, because everyone’s eyes are a little different, and headsets often don’t fully adjust to fit. I put on two different Pre headphones, and on one I felt like my vision was just a touch cross-eyed, and the second time I had a near-perfect photo. Even so, the text isn’t very comfortable to read – we’ll need another resolution jump (or really large font) to make the text easy to read in VR.
The controller has come a long way since we tried our last prototype.
The point is, VR is here and it works, but it won’t be an easy out-of-the-box experience. Valve has built some great stuff with Chaperone, but there’s no way to say how smooth or frustratingly complicated setting up a new headset will be, what kind of software quirks and crashes early adopters will experience, and for developers How easy is it to integrate this technology into their games, or how developers will take advantage of the controller, which has seen a ton of ergonomic improvements since I tried a prototype last year. With just a trackpad, triggers, and a few buttons, controllers don’t play nicely with classic gamepads. But maybe that’s a good thing for VR, as it will encourage more gesture input and VR-centric user interfaces.
With only a few months to go before launch, I’m only concerned that Valve and HTC might fall victim to the 990 rule. They’ve done the first 90%; do they have enough time to polish the remaining 90%?
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