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Comment by cbhl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!)

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