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Comment by joeevans1000 | Hacker News Reader

I am definitely holding out for HTC Vive, just on principle. It became much easier a decision when I checked out their amazing demo. I'm pretty sure Oculus will fall far behind in the race after an initial and short lived period of appearing to win the VR race. Facebook isn't a VR company. No VR product will do well with something like Facebook trying to contort and leverage it to a completely different purpose.

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The Vive is crazy amazing. We've been working with the Dev version and the Pre for months now, and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

My initial experience setting up the Vive as been disappointing.

- The software crashed several times

- There was no audio and then randomly there was audio (without me changing things)

- I had to go buy two giant six foot tripods for the motion sensors

- There are several large wires coming off the headset which plug into a box which plugs into the PC

- The HDMI cable is extremely short (and a longer one can cause issues).

- The Steam GPU test said my GTX480 could run it at high quality (which surprised me, but it ran the test fine)

- The display never turned on (just remained black) while it was tracking correctly on screen

- The first few attempts it didn't even show up on screen, just kept crashing.

I troubleshooted the thing for two days and gave up assuming I need to buy a better PC (I'm assuming their test is busted). I think Oculus and Palmer Luckey/Carmack have put a lot more effort into shipping a product that actually works.

I'm more willing to hack something to work than most people and this was still a pain/mess of wires.

Vive's software will get better. Corporatocracy only gets solved via bankrupcy.

I think the test may have bugged out. The minimum recommended spec is significantly higher than what you have.

I just got the Rift today, have had the Vive for a couple of weeks. Both have their pros and cons, but in all honestly, the Rift is way more polished and comfortable to wear. Once they get the hand controllers, it will definitely be better than the Vive. But it's still early days, I have a feeling the 2nd generation Vive will outdo the Rift.

Really? When giving demos myself and others seem to be able to get the Vive off and on more easily, the Oculus seems to leave marks on your face more often (because of the fit), and I find the light leaking from the nose area very distracting.

I'm also concerned about the durability of the Oculus. Being cloth covered it seems to pick things up. I'm also worried that once the fabric gets a tare it'll all start coming off.

I had a similar disappointment when first setting up the Vive, but after playing with it for an hour all was forgiven. It's certainly got some quirks but I'm very happy with it as a whole, and it will only get better.

Coming from Linux/Mac the last >decade, using Windows again has been disappointing. Many of these software issues are because of Windows 10 more than anything. My USB randomly dies, my own USB DAC randomly gets shuffled around with the Vive DAC so the mics get swapped or don't work at all, it crashes/bluescreens, it installs massive updates totally saturating my internet without any way to pause them, it constantly asks me to fill out surveys. I could go on.

Honestly I can't even blame Valve/HTC for this, I only blame them for not launching with SteamOS support on "Day 1" as they said. Any day now... (mumbles stuff about Valve Time.)

As for the rest, unfortunately that's the best of breed right now. Oculus is no different. Yes, there are wires (precisely one triple wire from the headset). Yes, you need the tracking sensors (on the bright side, Lighthouse wires only run to the AC outlet rather than your PC). Yes, you need a high-end videocard. When you're extending your HDMI cable, make sure to get an active HDMI cable rather than a passive one. People have extended theirs by over 50ft with no issues.

I'm assuming you haven't gotten your Rift yet (otherwise most of these wouldn't be a surprise). Hope it's a better experience for you! I'd upgrade the videocard while you wait, though. :)

Sounds like you are you are running out of USB resources it's your hardware not the OS. Try disabling XHCI this happens quite often when you have allot of USB 2.0 devices plugged in into USB 3.0 only chipset. Balancing them out between the chipsets that provide the USB ports (most motherboards have 2-3 additional USB hosts besides the PCH) can also sometimes solve it. A better solution is usually bundling the non-USB 3.0 devices on a dedicated hub.

I don't have that many devices: The Vive, an audio DAC, a keyboard, mouse, and a wifi stick. The motherboard is solid (Asus Z170-A). I tried moving various devices between different kinds of ports (2.0, 3.0, 3.1) and front vs back, not much difference. Many of the issues happen whether the Vive is plugged in or not.

I think it's a driver issue. Part of the problem I noticed (before I got the Vive) is that the keyboard is also a USB hub and sometimes the machine completely locks up if I try to use it before Windows is fully booted.

Another issue I ran into is when I installed the Vive bluetooth driver, the Vive HMD camera stopped working (also runs over the USB hub). I've read a few other threads where people ran into this issue. Weeeee.

That's enough if you have 2-3 USB 2.0 devices on a USB 3.0 only host it's enough to screw it up. I got a few ASUS mobo's that all have the same issues.

If you have USB2.0 breakout ports use them for the legacy devices, if not use a good USB hub.

oh my god thank you so much. UGHH so dumb.

Hrm, I'll try reshuffling a few more times. Thanks for the suggestion.

No offense, but your GTX480 is more than likely the cause of your visual issues. I hear you on mount space (I initially used bookshelves in my room like their preview video, then wall-mounted them which isn't ideal for everyone), but your claim that Vive hasn't shipped a working, polished product is pretty disingenuous.

Beyond that, what VR doesn't need as an ecosystem isn't fanboying (which your post comes off as, have you even tried the CV1 yet with your setup?) it needs its users to condemn actions like the ones taken by Oculus that weaken it as a whole. VR software is well and good for short demos, but the current catalog is small, of poor to mediocre quality, and generally too expensive for that quality. Users are going to remain on the fence (which is actually a positive for Oculus, with the release of Touch later on it'll reach feature parity with Vive's room-scale stuff and make it an easier sell) and smart studios are going to continue to wait before wasting any money on high-end VR development on PC.

Finally, all of this has finally convinced me that if you're interested in developing or investing in VR gaming the details on the PS4K and Playstation's VR roll-out at E3 are going to indicate how VR really fairs in its early years.

I think it's a little unfair to call 'fanboying' - I bought both devices the rift just hasn't arrived yet.

No doubt it probably is the GTX480, but their software test for VR capability is broken then. Maybe the rift will come and have similar issues, but for right now I'm only going off of the article I read where Palmer talked about how it's critical to get the first interaction right. This is something that the Vive did not (at least in my case).

I'll have a new build when the 1080 is out, but for now there's not much I can do.

What's the purpose of a "VR company" supposed to be? It's social apps, not games, that will propel VR into the mainstream. And that's Facebook's specialty.

Right, because people will spend hundreds of dollars on specialty hardware to do "social apps"

The most popular apps for the iPhone are social (three of which are owned by Facebook).

How are they going to benefit from VR headsets? (Remember, not only you need rather expensive headset itself, but the computing power too!)

What? You don't want advertising "dark patterns" piped directly into your cerebral cortex by way of a completely immersive interface?

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