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Comment by haydenlee | Hacker News Reader

Context for people not following VR religiously: the Vive is $200 more than the Oculus Rift however it includes hand controllers and an extra tracking device. Both come bundled with 2 games if you pre-order. The Rift also has integrated headphones that are attached to the strap whereas Vive has a headphone jack on the headset. They both have integrated microphones.

Edit: Rift also includes an Xbox controller in the $599 bundle and Oculus will be selling their own hand controllers (called Touch) in H2 2016.

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But you didn't even mention the biggest difference - the way they do positional tracking.

The Rift uses a camera pointing at the headset to track it, which means you have to be in the field of view of the camera. It's designed primarily for seated experiences.

The Vive uses two laser "lighthouses" and phototransistors on the headset to triangulate its position. It's actually really clever and allows room-scale VR.

I somewhat suspect that the Rift will be more successful - not many people have an entire room to dedicate to VR, it's cheaper, easier to set up, the dangling cable problem isn't so severe when seated.

I'm going to predict that Vive-style VR will be most popular in dedicated VR venues - i.e. instead of going to laserquest or paintballing, you go to a VR place. There are actually already some in the UK in shopping centres. I think they're called VR Zone or something like that. They're seated though, and I haven't tried them.

The Vive's tracking does not magically get around the constraint of having to be within field of view of the tracking devices. The lighthouses also have FOV.

The inverted tracking and placing the two in opposite corners does though. Going under one and facing away from the other will probably break the tracking but otherwise there's enough swept by either lighthouse to keep tracking.

http://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-valve-s-amazing-lighthouse-tr...

But that argument is true for the Rift cameras too. You can place Rift cameras in a similar setup to Lighthouses and achieve similar tracking volumes.

In theory yes you could but out of the box it doesn't support that. Is there any support for that currently or planned? I've never seen multiple cameras talked about with the Rift.

Not only is it supported but it has been confirmed that an extra camera will ship with the Touch controllers. Every time I have used Touch it has been with multiple cameras. At Oculus Connect 2 they had ~50 stations setup with multiple cameras.

There is something really ironic about going to a dedicated VR facility.

Dont get me wrong, I'd love to check a place like that out. But if this is the era of mainstream VR, you'll never have to leave the house to jack in.

You could say the same with movie theatres vs TVs though right?

Having tried experiences like The Void I'm confident these out of home experiences will be able to offer significantly more features to warrant leaving the house. Features that may never be possible in a house.

Not all Vive games have to support room-scale games, it works for sitting down/cockpit games just as well.

Beyond that, I really do think that the front camera (supporting AR to a degree, and being able to grab a drink or use a keyboard) and bluetooth/phone integration (immersion, collaboration) are the biggest technological advantages the Vive has. Recently game devs have been gushing over it, but when it comes to gamers typically the price really is the deciding factor regarding hardware adoption.

>the dangling cable problem isn't so severe when seated.

That is exactly why I don't get how people say the room scale thing makes the Vive the winner in this VR race.

As long as there are cords involved, being able to move around is not a game changer. Especially the way the Vive does things. Didn't HTC say they adressed the issue of being caught in the cords by making them visible in VR? Talk about immersion break. There you are, in the VR world and you look around and see the cords that actually bind you to a very narrow sector in real life.

This whole room scale VR can only become a thing once the tech is wireless and by there own statements, that is still a looong way from being a reality. Especially seeing as these are the 1st generation devices, I say you save yourself some money and get the rift seeing as you will not get much out of that feature that only the vive offers currently.

Really what makes the Vive the superior option (in my eyes) is that you can have both a seated experience and a roomscale experience. A roomscale experience also removes any "VR sickness" because all your movements translate 1:1 with the virtual world, so anyone who struggle with movement while being seated won't have the same issues with the Vive headset (in roomscale VR).

If you have tried VR, you will realize that one of the first thing people do, is try to look at their hands, only to be disappointed as they can't be seen. The Vive makes this possible on day 1. (Obviously not a 1:1 mapping of your hands, you'd need something like the Leap Motion Orion[0] for that.)

Most everyone who has tried the Vive have not found the wires to be a problem. Also what you say about seeing the cord in VR is not true, there is however something Valve calls the Chaperone[1] system which activates the camera when you are too close to the edges of your play area. The picture has a bluish tint, because the resolution of the camera is sub-par, so this is a cool workaround. It also prevents you from going around "worrying" that you will break something outside of VR, because as long as the system doesn't warn you about anything: You are good to do whatever you want in VR.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnlCGw-0R8g

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/N5UQrk9.jpg

You are not going to have room size experience with any of those headsets at home at least it's not feasible you are tethered with so much crap that you need a man servant walking after you ensuring that you don't hang yourself on that tether.

If you want a room size experience just hook up 2 OR cameras it will work the same way (but better) as the lighthouse approach that HTC took, and you can hook upto 50 of those cameras currently to track I believe up-to a 100 players.

As far as commercial room sized experience goes Vive is sub optimal, it's heavy, wobbly, doesn't have good audio support and you can't currently track more than 5 people at the time and since Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

> You are not going to have room size experience with any of those headsets at home at least it's not feasible you are tethered with so much crap that you need a man servant walking after you ensuring that you don't hang yourself on that tether.

Depends on the size of your play area obviously, but looks pretty good from this[0], and this "crap" you're talking about doesn't seem very bothersome.

> If you want a room size experience just hook up 2 OR cameras it will work the same way (but better) as the lighthouse approach that HTC took, and you can hook upto 50 of those cameras currently to track I believe up-to a 100 players.

Better how? I haven't seen a good comparison of them yet. I'm curious tho, how do you intend to scale up to 100 players using USB3 connections? That would be a MASSIVE amount of data flowing through the computer powering all of this(, the reason it requires USB3 is because it needs 60Hz high resolution image to have good tracking). The Vive takes a completly different approach by having the headset (and controllers) catch and interpret the (infrared) light emitted by the (dumb) lighthouses.[1]

> you can't currently track more than 5 people at the time

Do you have a source for this? I can't seem to find anything about this. Is it a limitation of the hardware or the software?

> Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

I'd be very surprised if this was true. Everything I've read seems to indicate lighthouse is built to be scalable from the ground up. The whole idea of it being wireless, only requiring a power outlet, makes it infinitely more scalable than any USB3 solution.

Again, would appreciate sources for any of your claims because I can't seem to find any of them...

EDIT: Here is a more indepth look at how the lighthouse technology actually works, because you seem slightly misinformed: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/05/17/valves-lighthouse-trac...

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIEuB7H9TOE

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/40877n/vive_lighthous...

>Depends on the size of your play area obviously, but looks pretty good from this[0], and this "crap" you're talking about doesn't seem very bothersome.

That's not a room experience they aren't moving, rotation slight side to side movement isn't an issue. If you haven't been to the demo's look at the demo's from CES/PAX/Gamescon for VR headsets that actually do whole room experience.

>Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

You can't install more than 2 lighthouses it's the current system limit I'm not sure what is surprising now, HTC said that future versions might have support for multiple trackers and that they are working with their commercial partners on another set of trackers that could both sense other trackers and have a wider spectrum range to support large scale commercial installations.

In the Vive demo's I've been too they went as far as putting up partitions in order to prevent interference if they were running multiple demos at the same time.

>Do you have a source for this? I can't seem to find anything about this. Is it a limitation of the hardware or the software?

That was the figure that was talked about during the demos, upcoming promotional events like http://virtuallydead.co.uk/ also limit it, I would say the limit is probably both in hardware and software but mainly "hardware" atm since the Vive room tracking only works when the room is upto 15 sq. feet anyhow (and technically only works when the room is at least around 15 sq. feet to begin with).

I'll just leave these here (vk2zay is Alan Yates, "Chief Pharologist[2] at Valve Corporation"):

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/3wwpi0/want_more_info...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/39i71o/room_scale_r...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharology

- Rift: headset, headphones, tracking camera, headphones, xbox controller, bundled games: $600

- Vive: headset, 2 tracking cameras, 2 one-hand controllers, bundled games $800

The Vive doesn't use cameras to track.

To elaborate, the base stations project infrared in a way that can be picked up by the HMD. The HMD then sends back position and orientation.

To further elaborate: http://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-valve-s-amazing-lighthouse-tr...

The exact design may have changed but the dual sweep is probably the same.

It does have a forward facing camera to enable AR/Hololens- like experiences though. But yeah, it's using the Lighthouses for tracking (relative for seated VR, absolute when standing)[1]. Fortunately for other VR systems they're open source and freely available to integrate into any hardware system.

[1] http://metaversing.com/2015/03/23/examining-the-valvehtc-viv...

Interesting. I guess it's not really a good 1-1 comparison if Vive and Rift have such widely different tracking systems.

I'd guess that Rift is less expensive to the end consumer thanks to Facebook subsidizing, and HTC/Valve waited to price their VR device higher so they could position their device as the 'expensive high end' gaming VR device. Both Rift and Vive are probably going to be sold at a loss for at least few years just so they can get the market segment to boom, so they can manufacture at a large enough scale to profit.

I'm really interested to see what the gap will be once you include the Touch controllers into the Oculus's price. Under $100?

I expect the Oculous touch controllers to cost $199, this would make the Rift more expensive than the Vive in most parts of the world (you have to pay shipping twice).

I was just looking for how to get sound from the headset, thanks!

No problem! As a VR developer I'm pretty bummed that Vive isn't including integrated headphones. It's such a pain to put on headphones and the headset at the same time.

but that convenience will surely backfire if the included headsets are not super-ultra-hi-def-audiophile-yada-yada

Having tried the CV1 multiple times I can say the headphones are surprisingly incredible. Every time I use them I'm impressed. I doubt I will ever use other headphones with the Rift.

That, and at the price point of this gear, it's safe to assume they'll have their own preferred headset/earbuds. It's an additional wire, but really not a huge deal.

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