Hacker News Reader

Comment by arielweisberg | Hacker News Reader

Because the Oculus headset works on Steam games, but the Vive doesn't out of the box work with Oculus Home. You can make it work, but it's not quite official. The Rift is also a little bit more comfortable and people seem to the think the display is generally better.

The real reason not to buy the Oculus is because there aren't motion tracked controllers for it yet. There also isn't a lot of room scale experience out there with Oculus so it's not totally clear how it's going to compare when the touch controllers are available.

Early reports sound positive, but early reports are early. The potential for the Rift seems a little greater. Oculus Touch controllers look like they are going to be a real nice piece of kit.

Disclaimer. I went with the Rift because it was more comfortable and I had no problem waiting for motion tracked controllers.

View on HN

Yes, the Oculus does work with Steam VR games (well, a fraction of them) because Valve was sensible enough to not put hardware checks in their games.

As for Oculus Home, you could say that it's the VR version of Games for Windows. Sure, it'll be around for a few years, but the dominant service will always be Steam. I'm not really sure why Facebook paid 2 Billion for them because their store is never going to flourish so if they were expecting to monetize Oculus that way then they really guessed wrong. I wouldn't be surprised to see their service shuttered just as Games for Windows was.

The problem with Oculus Touch (they're sweet-looking controllers, and I hope Valve steals that type of idea) is that it doesn't ship with every Rift. For Vive owners, a developer can assume that they all have room-scale positional tracking and motion controllers. With Rift, if a developer wants to write Touch support, they're shooting for a fraction of an already-tiny market. I mean, the Rift could fail before Touch gains any traction (hope not). Why would a developer take the chance?

Of course, Oculus' salvation is that they're owned by Facebook, so they'll never run out of money to throw at the problem.

“Because the Oculus headset works on Steam games, but the Vive doesn't out of the box work with Oculus Home. You can make it work, but it's not quite official. The Rift is also a little bit more comfortable and people seem to the think the display is generally better."

What? Why would you want Vive to make it work with Oculus Home? Isn't that like saying you want your Android phone to visit Apple's App Store?

Vive works with Steam and I think that's more than adequate. And Vive works with Steam games too, so not sure why you said your first sentence.

This metaphor is dangerous. One potential future for VR is one where Oculus (or Rift) and Vive are two separate platforms, like smartphones. Some overlap in releases, but in general, no compatibility.

The other future is one where your VR device is a replacable peripheral, like a screen or a keyboard. It's absurd to think you'd have to double-check whether the game you want to play supports Dell monitors.

One of these futures is better for consumers, and I'd wager it's the second.

> Isn't that like saying you want your Android phone to visit Apple's App Store

That would be awesome, there's lots of iOS exclusive apps I wish I could use.

> And Vive works with Steam games too, so not sure why you said your first sentence.

Oculus gets Steam + Oculus Store. Vive only gets Steam.

> Because the Oculus headset works on Steam games, but the Vive doesn't out of the box work with Oculus Home. You can make it work, but it's not quite official.

Works with seated SteamVR experiences, but not room scale ones, which I think is a more compelling experience.

I'm worried about the lack of camera on the Rift. Seem like Room Scale would be very hard without it. Seeing the borders if you started walking too far feels like a necessity to me.

The headset camera is not needed for showing borders. Vive does it with an overlay 3d grid in the Vr space. I don't think I ever used the camera in my Vive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com