Virtual reality is looking set to be the next big thing, but it hasn’t been a quick revolution, or one with a coherent message. Oculus Rift has been the PC gaming community’s darling since 2013 (though Facebook’s acquisition might take the sheen off that love affair), then more recently we’ve had Sony’s PS4-powered Morpheus, the smartphone-based Samsung Gear VR, and the Google’s VR-for-all Cardboard viewer. VR headsets are going to come thick and fast over the next year, and today we got to try out the HTC Vive, produced in collaboration with PC-gaming behemoth Valve under its SteamVR initiative.
Speaking of behemoths my first experience with HTC Vive was nothing short of awe inducing. Standing on the deck of a sunken ship, I edged towards the prow to look down into the watery abyss below. Sensing, or maybe hearing, something over my left shoulder I turned to find a gigantic whale had snuck up on me while I was distracted. I backed away from it in surprise, and then marvelled as this glorious leviathan glided past me just out of reach, its huge and detailed eye tracking me as it went.
Yes, you read that right, HTC Vive not only provides an immersive headset, it also has a location tracking system, which allows it to track your actual movements and recreate them in the virtual world. What more it works brilliantly, with both moving and turning tracked with incredible accuracy, this lets you drop to your knees and then peer out sideways past something in the game world.
HTC Vive
The HTC Vive actually consists of three elements, the Vive headset, a pair of location sensing base stations and two SteamVR control sticks, one for each hand.
The headset looks much as you’d expect. It’s a typical strap-it-to-your-head VR headset which is similar in size and weight to the current Oculus model. They’re both behind Sony’s Morpheus here though, with it’s clever ring that distribute the weight in a hat-like fashion and leaves the screen just touching your face, rather than pushed against it.
It’s similar inside too, with a pair of 1,080x1,200 OLED displays, one for each eye, yes you can still see the pixel grid if you look hard but if you’re not trying to pick holes then it stands up very well. These refresh 90 times a second and so provide very smooth feedback in response to your motions. It has a 100 degree field of view, and everything looked crisp in the centre of my view, but tailed off when I tried to look to the side with my eyes, instead of turning my head. In this respect though it’s much like other VR headsets.
The base stations look more pre-production than the headset, being small black cubes with a array of chips on the front. You place them in opposite corners of your room, creating a square up to 5x5m. Lasers in the stations are then tracked by the headset, which as you can see is studded with sensors, in order to calculate its exact position and angle, down to a tenth of a degree apparently.
Finally you have the SteamVR controllers. These stick like devices don’t look like much, with a single trigger, a touchpad on the front - which is taken from Valve’s Steam Controller design - and a strangely angular head, again to locate it using the laser positioning. However, you won’t be looking at it like that, as in the virtual world it transforms into a variety of more interesting shapes and devices.
I started off in the white expanse of the initial calibration space. I tried asking for ‘guns, lots of guns’ but to avail. What I could do was create balloons but pulling the trigger on the controller, which would then inflate from the top of the device (or rather a virtual representation of the device in shining white). The balloons rose slowly but I could bat them away with the controller, whose motions matched my own to perfection. The balloons flew off as expected, the only thing lacking being any tangible feedback as I bopped them.
Cabled up
A few more enagaing experiences later, I was totally immersed in Vive’s virtual reality and had largely forgotten about the darkened room I was actually stood in, somewhere on the just-opened show floor of Gamescom in Cologne. The only snag, literally, was the cable protruding from the back of my head, as I got caught up in it a couple of times when stepping backwards.
For VR experiences when sitting down it’s not a big problem, but when you’re moving about a cable can be a liability, so we’ll need to see if HTC can come up with a way to keep it out the way, if it was strung at waist height instead of snaking across the floor. The cable is there to connect the headset to the heavyweight gaming PC required to make those 90Hz visuals run smoothly.
And that’s where Valve’s involvement comes in with its SteamVR initiative. SteamVR is an overarching name including the current HTC Vive Developer Edition headset we tried, the SteamVR controllers and the free-to-use SteamVR APIs which let developers get to grips with the hardware.
Dota 2: Secret Shop
The high point of the demo came at the end when I got to play around in the Valve-created Secret Shop. While the other demos were limited in scope, graphically simplistic and sometimes both, the Secret Shop is a luscious fantasy experience with nods to Valve’s mind-bogglingly popular Dota 2.
Set in a small, rickety hut rendered in the bold and colourful style familiar from Dota 2 (and from most of Blizzard’s fantasy franchises too), the Secret Shop starts out dark. Then the rotund shopkeeper arrives and provides a small magical light for you to wield. Using this you can explore the shop (which in size roughly correlates to the area of movement that the HTC Vive allows) and shrink down in size to get up close with its details.
We watched in horror as a tiny spider, not rendered huge in our eyes, approached over a desk. We explored a shelf and were startled by a massive toad, and finally the roof of the hut was ripped off by a dragon. It’s incredibly immersive stuff and beautifully rendered, with gorgeous, highly-detailed graphics that really show what VR could do.
We wished we’d had another 10 minutes with the demo, but we reckon that would be probably enough. That statement can be made about much of our VR experiences though. There simply isn’t enough content out there yet to persuade most people, me included, to part with their cash. I’d strongly recommend you try VR given a chance but the chicken-and-egg problem of content and users may become an issue (though HBO, Lionsgate and Google are listed as partners).
Can it surVive
HTC and Valve's collaboration on SteamVR and Vive is looking very strong indeed. The hardware is up there with the best currently available and the motion tracking and controllers are brilliantly implemented. Surprisingly the consumer version of the headset is currently set for a launch this year. In a sector where ‘coming next year’ has practically become a mantra, the Vive’s rapid move to a full launch has to be applauded. The question is will there be enough software to justify a purchase.
Serious PC gamers have to be the initial targets, as they already have the kind of PCs required to supply the Vive with pretty visuals. To date Oculus has made the bigger splash, but with the Facebook acquisition, many such gamers would rather opt for a Valve-supported headset. We think the Vive will suffer from a slow start, partly due to its high entry requirements, but also because many will simply wait and see how it shapes up to the Oculus in 2016, but in the long run it stands a good chance of success. Or as good as any VR headset at least.
