Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble? Is it jettisoning an unprofitable money pit or is it the opposite - that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels? Both (VR not doing well, HTC needs $)? Not familiar with the numbers.

Fuck. If Google ends up with Vive and Facebook has Occulus that'll about kill my interest in the tech. Both of those companies would rather flail aimlessly at making money over providing a quality product and the last thing I'd like to do is invest in their ecosystems further. Though Google is capable of subsidizing the tech for awhile, which might be nice...

It's finally starting to get reasonably priced for what it is (I have earned the right to complain; bought a Vive a ~year ago). Haven't touched it for about 8 of those months because the games weren't fundamentally better than non-VR and in a lot of ways were worse.

So much potential there, though. Play Quake in VR and realize what 21 year old (and free) tech is capable of.

"Does this suggest the VR industry is in trouble?"

No, it's gaining speed in fact. Most of the applications are not in consumer but in business. See the new Microsoft VR platform and the headsets from HP and Asus. Those are the reason the current Vive is not so hot anymore - they manage full movement without large cables and without difficult to set up beacons.

If Varjo's varied resolution technology with eye tracking which enables high resolution rendering only where it's needed succeeds as promised that could be a huge boon (http://www.varjo.com)

But - for professional applications, not games.

What is the new Microsoft VR platform? I never heard of it and it seems extremely unlikely to me that they would throw money to a VR platform after all their investments in AR.

This is kind of old news but the devkits are only now coming out - and who knows when the devices reach consumers en masse.

The difference with these new devices and Hololens is that Hololens is a standalone selfcontained device with compute unit and display with AR capable optics while these new headsets are full block-the-real-world vr headsets, more like Vive, except they don't need beacons for head tracking but use device mounted cameras. In effect, they are lighter and need less setup than Vive.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/acer-windows-mixed-r...

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/141215-windows-mixed-reality...

This has nothing to do with VR. I know very well hololens, and exactly for this reason I said that would be very strange for Microsoft to invest in VR given all the huge time and money investment in AR. Hololens is AR not VR.

"I said that would be very strange for Microsoft to invest in VR..."

The fact remains they are selling very VR capable helmets with display and optics which block the view completely. Maybe Microsoft is displaying a different page for you from the page I linked?

I tried the new Asus devkit headset only last week. It's not the hololens. It's sold on the same page, though.

They are selling it for AR as the "mixed reality" in the name of the product explains. The difference with the hololens is that it is getting the world images from a front camera rather than using a transparent display. Ergo, as I was pointing out from the beginning, MS is investing massively only on AR, could not care less for VR.

Phew, so we are discussing the same thing, good.

The cameras enable room scale head tracking. Projecting the camera image as a backdrop is optional. If I'm not using the camera image as a backdrop I think the experience would be characterized as VR.

I don't really understand why you insist on this AR/VR dichotomy - a good AR headset is a pretty good VR headset as a basic requirement.

AR can obviously do VR but it is much more. And the opposite of course is not true. That said I don't think that anyone would choose to do VR when they can have mixed reality.

Vive is the only part of HTC that's making any money right now. HTC is not doing well.

Having used Oculus, Daydream, and Vive, I still think Vive provides the best experience. Vive is "room scale", whereas Oculus and Daydream both are "pivoting in an office chair scale". (Oculus has experimental tracking cameras now, but you can't assume the whole install base has them.)

But VR as a whole is still in its infancy. Some experiences don't work for users who are too tall or short (say, children). The install base is also still too small to run a profitable business creating just VR content.

The Oculus camera tracking system is not experimental, it's been in user's hands for years and you can safely assume the whole active install base has them without any risk...

The big room scale situations are the only cases in which Vive is better. The VR is smoother on Rift, the apps are better, the headset is more comfortable, the Touch controllers are better, the optics are less blurry to the view extents, the software is much less buggy, etc.

I now have both and it's close enough that I still tend to use the Vive over the Rift day to day. I was surprised that the Rift controllers weren't so obviously better that I wanted to switch. Familiarity trumped other factors on that front.

I actually greatly prefer the vive controllers. The Rift controllers have thumbsticks, which I detest with a passion and find painful and uncontrollable. The Steam Controller touchpad feels completely different and natural.

Of course, people who have grown up playing on controllers with thumbsticks will disagree, but I suspect the touchpad comes more intuitively to the non-gamer market.

I'd say even small room scale benefits from the Vive tracking. My VR space at home (aka living room) is just barely 2x2m, but setting up the Rift in there was an exercise in frustration and a mess of USB cables.

I first tried the experimental 2 camera 360 tracking which sort of worked but had plenty of dead zones. The official line on that is to add a third sensor, which I did. It came with a 5m USB extension cable which wasn't long enough to reach the back of the room so I had to hunt around for a 10m extension instead; that in itself is a gamble as everyone's mileage seems to vary as to what will work for them.

After setting up all the cameras I still had to ignore lots of "low quality tracking" errors reported by the setup - apparently that's because my motherboard couldn't provide enough juice for all the cameras and the headset.

The lighthouses in comparison are just great. I just screwed them into the wall, plugged them in to an outlet and that was it.

I do prefer the touch controllers. The capacitive buttons are superb and well used in many Rift games. The headset itself is more comfortable than a vanilla Vive, although the Vive's deluxe audio strap make them equally as comfortable for me (at significant additional expense!)

There's a port of Quake to iPhone-based VR using any old Cardboard headset: https://github.com/Izhido/Quake_For_OSX

I got to compile (had to fix some bugs in the source), and played for about 5 minutes before the motion sickness hit hard.

I'm really not surprised. Cardboard is very prone to inducing nausea as there's not any attempt to ensure decent latency.

Daydream/GearVR is the base level for mobile VR and even they are much more disorientating than PC VR due to the lack of positional head tracking.

Currently it's Vive/Rift or don't bother calling it VR as far as I'm concerned. We'll see what Microsoft and the standalone Daydream with inside-out tracking bring to the table.

> that VR is doing well and HTC needs money, so it's selling the crown jewels

As a division, Vive is doing very well but HTC is primarily a phone company which has been dying a slow death. From an overall strategic perspective it looks like HTC has no choice but to look for a buyer but as the article points out "A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer".

Don't worry, VR has been a colossal failure regardless of HTC's reasoning.

Why do you feel so strongly about it? I'm curious about your definition of "failure". It sounds very final.

Aside from the better room scale tracking, the Facebook VR system is better than the Vive (and all other VR systems) on almost all other counts. So I don't understand what you are talking about regarding a quality product.

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