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Comment by yaegers | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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

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