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Comment by jsonderulio | Hacker News Reader

Oculus Summer of VR totally shattered their expectations. Sets were back-ordered for a while. Vive saw their market & new platform developers running away from them.

Having tried both in multiple capacities, the tracking and field of view are better of the Vive. But the Oculus has a better developer network & content, is easier to use, and seems to deliver a better final resolution.

Also $400 vs $600 is compelling, although if you can afford VR you are probably not exclusively price sensitive.

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It's super easy to get Occulus content running on a Vive.

IF you're going to invest in VR, AND you've waited this long, you might as well wait for gen-2 hardware--with the hope they are wireless headsets.

If you want to try it out, just get Google Cardboard or Google Dream.

I'm not sure if Google Cardboard is a good way to "try it out". For me it was terribly underwhelming experience when compared to Vive; certainly wouldn't get me more interested in VR.

On the other hand, I got to try Vive before Cardboard, so that probably raised my expectations for VR quite high and thus Cardboard seemed so limited.

> with the hope they are wireless headsets

wouldn't going wireless imply heavy batteries strapped to your head?

Why? GearVR gets ~2 hours of usage that's more than enough for most VR play sessions (it's actually quite tiring). And GearVR also has to run Android and the rest of the cell phone crap and the cell phone form factor limits the battery size. You likely going to be easily be able to get 3-4 if not more hours of playtime from a pretty light battery by using just a slightly bigger battery than in an high end cell phone and while optimizing the hardware for VR rather than general purpose cell phone usage.

Or possibly strapped to another part of your body. You'd still get the benefit of not having a cord pulling on your head or tripping you.

Wearing a power pack on your back with a cord to the head would be quite fine. The only thing to be careful about is batteries that get too hot. But in a weird way, that's better on your back because I think if people were forced to choose, a fire on one's back is better than a fire on one's head. No fire is of course the best. :)

I much prefer Touch to the Vive controllers. Knuckles looks a little interesting, but not nearly as ergonomic as Touch

You also have the release of the PSVR, which is outselling both of them at ~$400.

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