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Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

I like how Vive is shipping with purpose-built VR controllers instead of an Xbox One controller (ala Oculus Rift). That said, having the option to forego controllers entirely would be preferable, and a nice way to reduce cost.

Both have a 2160x1200 display.

I'm curious which headset will be a) more comfortable and b) offer superior stationary head tracking. The room-scale tracking on the Vive is nice, but I'm thinking most people will prefer whichever has superior stationary tracking.

Supposedly the integrated headphones on the Rift will approach audiophile-grade quality. The Vive is shipping with earbuds, so presumably less fidelity there. Personally I wish both would ship without any audio equipment at all since I'm just going to use my existing headphones and microphone.

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>That said, having the option to forego controllers entirely would be preferable

It's not good for HTC if it means splitting up the control schemes for the platform, which forces developers to avoid games that only work with motion controls.

Yes, exactly. I've stalked around VR communities for a long time, and control fragmentation is a serious and persistent concern. There's also a perception that a lot of people with a $1000 gaming rig will have gotten a gamepad at some point -- part of why the "XBone" controller was seen as a joke when announced (but also because it was the same event they reeled in Oculus Touch launch time frame expectation).

The community is already split, if you look at this from another perspective it allows developers to focus on the visual game play related aspects of VR and perfecting them while deferring tackling with motion controls.

This reduces the gap that game developers have to breach, and also allows you to add easy VR support for games which will not be dedicated to VR platforms.

So far motion controls were nothing more than a niche, Wii included.

>That said, having the option to forego controllers entirely would be preferable, and a nice way to reduce cost.

Although it is a third party peripheral the leap motion is what you're looking for:

http://store-us.leapmotion.com/

Plus it's half off today.

After using a kinect for a few years, I think buttons and controllers are very important for most applications.

Having that tactile feedback for input helps for so many situations. Also it will make it easier to port existing games/apps. The learning curve will also be much easier.

I have a leap motion on the way. I don't have very high hopes of seeing wide adoption and integration due to it being a third party controller but this should hold me over until the oculus touch controllers launch.

If I wasn't getting a Oculus CV1 for free I'd probably be ordering a vive today.

The positional tracking tech valve is using seems like the most elegant, robust solution I've seen yet, so I certainly hope it becomes a standard. The best part about it is that the cost per device is so low to implement it (the tracking components on the objects are dead simple and very cheap to make) so there's a good case to be made for using this standard, because you could proliferate all sorts of low cost tracking controllers to use with it.

I already have the controller I want to use with VR, it's a steering wheel, pedals and shifter set.

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