Vive headset: diving head first into a virtual reality

HTC’s new Vive virtual reality headset is the closest you’ll find to Star Trek’s holodeck.

Image from the Vive app TheBlu: Encounter.

When you strap on HTC’s incredible new Vive virtual reality headset, you’re transported into digital landscapes that you don’t just watch. You walk through them, jump around them and reach out to grab them.

Step one of the Vive’s setup ought to read, “Buy a bigger house.” You’re going to want an unobstructed 4.5m x 4.5m patch. Coffee tables and ottomans will have to go. Pets, too. Think of this $820 gadget less like buying a new television and more like installing a swimming pool.

Last week, rival Oculus Rift debuted the first immersive VR system targeting gamers who stand or sit alone, hooked to a long cable, in front of a pricey PC while wearing video goggles. With the Vive, which began shipping on Tuesday, you’ve still got the PC tethered to the goggles but now you’re wandering around and swinging your arms in the air, too.

Neither experience is exactly natural. But the Vive is the first tech to arrive at home that makes interacting with a computer as intuitive as walking and pointing at things. Here at the beginning of the VR era, it’s the closest you’ll find to Star Trek’s holodeck, the virtual vacation machine.

That became clear last Friday when I was crawling around the floor with a Vive headset on, jabbing at the air with a 20cm wand. Inside my headset I was floating in the sea, probing an anemone. A Vive app called TheBlu: Encounter dropped me in a computer-generated reef that I could explore. The view made me gasp.

The Vive is less buzzy than Oculus and its product is less refined. That’s not saying much; I wouldn’t buy either right now. Yet the Vive has two advantages. First, I was free to move around the whole room, so I could inspect a critter up close. Second, holding motion-sensitive controllers, my hands became part of the action so I could interact with the undersea life.

What makes both possible is laser tech straight out of Mission: Impossible. You mount two small boxes on opposite walls and they sweep your play space with invisible lasers. Using these, the Vive tracks 32 sensors on your headset and 24 on each controller, so it can locate your head and hands with precision. That’s how it knows when you’re crawling in one corner of the ocean floor or reaching out to bop a giant jellyfish.

Whenever you get a little too close to an obstacle, a virtual wall called the Chaperone shows up in your field of view. The Vive knows where the real walls are because you trace your safe perimeter with motion controllers during setup.

The Vive’s sensors can track up to 20sq m. (You can use it in smaller spaces but won’t be able to use some games.) In contrast, the Oculus Rift uses one sensor, more akin to the Xbox Kinect body tracker, which restricts your motion
to a radius of a few metres.

Vive’s safeguards make it more comfortable than the Rift and other systems. In addition to the Chaperone, HTC put a camera on the Vive headset: double tap a button on your controller and up pops the real world. Soon, the Vive will notify you when you are receiving calls and texts, a feature that wasn’t ready for me to test.

It’s too early to tell who will win the VR race, but the Vive isn’t in the pole position. Oculus has the resources and sway of its owner, Facebook. There’s also Sony, whose PlayStation VR debuts this year with the backing of the most popular game console and one of Hollywood’s biggest studios.

The Vive and Rift face challenges attracting a mainstream audience. The image quality isn’t sufficient to convince you that you’re in another reality. Everything is a little pixelated. Not to mention it’s boring to have people over to your house and then sit idly as they use Vive — all the more so when they’re taking up a whole room to do it.

The Wall Street Journal