HTC Vive - First Few Days Impressions Part 2

Welcome to the second part of my "First Few Days" review of the HTC Vive.

In the first part, I focussed on the technology and ease of use, to come to the conclusion that you do need to have some general technical ability in order to get on with using the HTV Vive headset.

In this part, I am looking more at the actual experience of using the headset. What are the first experiences using the headset like? How do you get on with finding more stuff to do? What is the quality of what is out there?

The Lab - A great first VR experience

The Very First Experience - The Lab

If you read all the articles in the Internet about the HTC Vive headset itself, but also the best experiences there are, both types of article will repeatedly mention The Lab, even one year after the Vive headset has come out. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

The Good Thing About The Lab

It's a good thing because The Lab does demonstrate the very best of the VR World. It is a completely realistic feeling virtual world with plenty for you tinker and play around in. I highly recommend The Lab as being the very first thing you load up on your new headset because it genuinely does instill the real sense of actually being there, and it gives you a great taster of how the VR world can be utilised for a wide range of fun experiences, combined with the typical sense of comedy you get from some of Valve's signature offerings like Portal.

Xortex - A novel VR shoot-em-up

My favourite experiences are:

• Xortex - a shoot 'em up where you basically turn one of your hands into a spaceship and you fly around an arena dodging bullets and shooting back by moving your hand around and aiming at the baddies.
• Longbow - An archery game where your controllers are the bow and arrow and you have to defend your castle against the enemy hordes. There are no sight trails or cross-hairs to help you with this, you have to aim just using your own depth perception and hand-eye coordination and it works great!
• Secret Shop - Not a game as such, like Xortex and Longbow, but an experience. This is a great demonstration of another side of the VR experience, just looking around a virtual world and playing with stuff.

Longbow - your aim is your own

 

The Bad Things About The Lab

The reason that, 1 year after release, The Lab is still continually mentioned as one of the "must do" experiences and in various top 10 lists, is that it highlights the lack of comparable experiences available on the market.

Bearing in mind I haven't even had my HTC Vive for a week, obviously I have only just scratched the surface and so I am sure there are great experiences right at my fingertips that I just haven't looked at properly, but when you start diving through Steam and Viveport you start to understand that there are a lot of things on offer with quite high price tags to be gambling on things.

Trying Stuff Out

So obviously you will start with the free offerings, and this gives you a sense of the very wide-ranging levels of quality and gives you even more of a dilemma when it comes to finding more experiences to do.

Here are some of the things I have tried with a very short one/two sentence review.

Allumette - A short story/animation

• Allumette - A great little animation and story, but quite short. Good for free, and probably something great to show your wife/girlfriend, but I wouldn't pay for it.
• Everest VR - As a freeby bundled with the HTC Vive, Everest is a great "feels like you are there" experience and a fun way to spend half an hour. As a £10.99 experience you have to pay for, totally not worth it. It's a great experience, the fun is around the realistic conveyance of the Everest and the insight into the experience of climbing it, but it entails standing and listening for 5 minutes and then doing a very simple action, then standing for 5 minutes and doing a very simple action....
• Richie's Plank Experience - This is another bundled freeby, and as a freeby it is "okay." As a paid for experience I'd feel ripped off. It's an okay bit of fun for 5 minutes because it's free, but really it is quite amateurish.
• The Price of Freedom - This is a short-blast adventure game which basically consists of rummaging around finding things whilst having a simple story around it. The game was good, but it was very buggy. Again, great as a freeby on Steam, I wouldn't want to pay for it.
• Belko VR: An Escape Room Experiment - I've done Escape Rooms in real life and this game gives you a good experience of the same. The challenge is easy but fun. The time pressure adds to the fun element but it does have you bashing the walls as you forget where your room scale boundaries are. A great free experience that has a few minor glitches.

Everest VR - immersive but overpriced

So all the above was what gave me a sense that actually, once you start looking into it, you realise that there are not a wealth of truly immersive experiences that you are going to be happy signing yourself up for. The quality is lacking in a lot of them and/or a lot of them are really short. Everest VR is great as an experience, but £10.99 for 15-30 minutes of original experience? Really?

So, if you are like me, you start thinking about what is open to you. You've just spend £759 on the hardware (plus £20 on a HDMI/DVI cable in my case), you've tried the freebies, now you're left spending £5, £10, or £20 a time on 30 minute experiences? It doesn't add up to a good thing.

Thankfully, there are solutions to this.

The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed

This game deserves its own section in today's blog post, because it is exactly the type of game experience you bought your headset for.

The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed is a completely immersive, fun, top quality, stable VR gaming experience. It gives you a great sense of fun in just presenting a world you are happy to wonder aimlessly around in and just try stuff out (and there are Steam achievements for various pointless-but-fun tasks).

Call of the Starseed - A true VR game

I must admit, I tried it because, like Everest VR, it is free bundled with the Vive, but unlike any of the other free experiences I have tried, with this one I would have been happy paying for it. It is still quite short, but at least it is 2 hours of gaming short rather than 15 minutes. Also, I am definitely going to be buying the further episodes as they are released. It's still true that £14.99 is still a fair amount to pay for a game much shorter than a triple-A non-VR game you might buy, but the fully immersive experience makes it worth it, at least until the market gets a bit more depth.

I'm looking forward to episode 2 of this game series to come out! In the meantime, here is a more in-depth review that largely reflects how I feel about this game.

VorpX

This is something I have mentioned in a previous post, and I won't go into detail yet because it is worthy of a post on its own, but with VorpX, this is something where if you can get to grips with setting it up, a fair investment of roughly £35 is going to give you hours, day and months of great time with your headset.

VR Mods to Existing Games

Doom 3 VR - time to poo yourself?

This is something I have yet to dive into, but I ready yestermod available for Doom 3 BFG Edition that makes it a 100% VR experience like the game was designed for it from the ground up. I look forward to trying that out and writing about it.
day about a

To Sum Up

Even after 1 year, the VR market is rather thin on the ground. There are some reasonable but short free experiences, there are a previous few decent paid-for experiences (looking forward to looking deeper at Serious Sam in the future)....

But after a couple of days of looking at the true VR market, I have already switched to the Modding world in order to play my old games in VR.

This sums up the real problem with the VR market currently, there are no triple A experiences
. In the traditional gaming world we are used to paying £30 for rock-solid games that last 100 hours of play, not half that amount for 5% of the experience and bugs to contend with.

Converts old games into VR experiences

I still have absolutely no regrets about my HTC Vive purchase, largely thanks to VorpX at the moment it has to be said. Still, Fallout 4 VR Edition can't get here soon enough.

So this is why I think, if you are going to buy a VR headset today, you do need to have technical knowhow in order to get the best out of it. There just isn't enough instant access "it just works" experience out there without paying (another) arm and a leg to find it.

HTC Vive - First Few Days Impressions Part 1

5 Days Later - Technical Sense Needed

So, it is day 5 since my HTC Vive was delivered and installed. Luckily for the child part of the man-child inside me, I got 4 days with the wife away, so I was pretty much spending all my evening time playing on the Vive.

I do have a lot of observations to make. In fact, I have so many observations to make that I have split my "first impressions" blog post in two. In this one, I'm talking the more technical observations I have to make about using the Vive. In the second post I talk more about the depth of the VR market (or lack thereof).

You Need Some Technical Sense

Making the assumption that the experience with Oculus Rift is the same as with HTC Vive (which is quite a big assumption, but I'm not about to buy a Rift so it will have to do), I would say that diving into the VR world is absolutely not for the technophobe or the person that wants it all to "just work." I think if you are that type of person, you would be better off buying a PS4 and PSVR system (again based on an assumption, this time that PlayStation generally does a pretty good job of making their stuff easy to use).

Important Caveat: Because I know how to tinker, I do tinker. The most "tinkerish" thing I do is use Vorpx, which isn't really explained here. Basically, please note, a few of these issues may just be down to me messing around, but the majority of them are not.

Assumptions aside, the HTC Vive does need a generally technical brain I would say. You need to be comfortable installating software and drivers, trying stuff out, tweaking settings, etc..

Why do I say this?

Alumette, a great little VR experience

Well, my observations about how the software works is that you appear to have a VR subsystem, almost like a VR operating system, that creates a platform for VR worlds to be created on top of. I base this judgement on some observations I have made playing various games and VR experiences.

• I've seen several instances where animations in virtual worlds appear to suffer from "frame rate" issues, but at the same time the view presented in the headset is still completely smooth. It's tricky to explain, but as an example, in the free animation Allumette available on Steam, when you are watching the story, you can look around the little world and get absolutely 100% smooth head tracking, but at the same time the animations in the world sometimes appear jerky. So you appear to get this situation in VR games where head tracking is completely smooth, which obviously means at some level you are getting very high frame rates on the headset, whilst stuff actually going in the world can get "laggy". By the way, please don't let my description here put you off watching Alumette, it's a great little story and demonstration of VR.



The SteamVR "Empty" World

• The other "clue" to the seperation of the VR subsystem from the games that run within, is the glitches in some of the buggy games. I quite liked playing The Price of Freedom on Viveport, another free game, but one of the issues I noticed in this game was this tendency for the gameworld to keep vanishing for split seconds, and when it did vanish, you could see the SteamVR Empty World underneath the game world.

Why am I explaining the VR Subsystem?

Because, you do notice quite a wide range of small issues when using the Vive. None of them are deal breakers, and most of them aren't anything more than a minor distractions, but I've seen a lot of them.

• Several games/experiences where the world flashes out and you see the Steam Empty World underneath.
• Occasional random complaints from SteamVR about various software components not working. I just had one five minutes ago, whilst writing this post, where it said the Compositor wasn't working, "please click this link to start". I clicked the link and nothing happened, so I stopped SteamVR and restarted it again, and this fixed the problem.
• Audio issues if you use SteamVR inbetween trying to do other stuff on your PC. This is because when you run SteamVR, it prioritises headset audio over your standard PC audio. If you don't have the headset earphones in you won't hear anthing. It's easy to control this by going into Windows Control Panel Audio settings, but then it's easy because I already knew how to do that.



Get familiar with audio controls

• Out of the box, there were firmware updates available for every single hardware component: Headset, controllers, base stations and link box. I found these updates and ran them just by playing around with SteamVR, I was not prompted at all that updates were available.

The final reason spills over into my next blog post, talking more about the limitations of the VR Market and VorpX. VorpX itself is a requirement in my opinion, but there is no hand-holding using this software and a lot of tweaking is needed.

Ultimately...

In order to get on and get full enjoyment out of the major investment you just made, you need to start understanding how it all works. I absolutely love my HTC Vive headset, I haven't regretted buying it for a second, but I am a person that takes pleasure in understanding how technology works.

Although clearly a lot of effort has gone into making the Vive as pain-free to use as possible, as noted in my post about installation, the actual day to day use is not pain-free at all. It is not bad, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't "just work."

Perhaps consider how PC gaming is these days to how it was 10 years ago. These days, you install Steam, you get yourself an XBox style controller, job done. Sure, you get some issues today with PC gaming, but not really a great deal. 10 years ago you had to manage drivers, manage background Windows applications to free up resources, manage hardware conflicts and deal with Windows issues all the time.

I expect the VR experience will mature as time goes on, assuming the market thrives and grows, which I very much hope it does. But today, if you want to use VR, be prepared to get your hands dirty.

HTC Vive - Installation

HTC Vive - Installation

First step - follow this link!

As you might expect with the numberous parts and cables, setting up the HTC Vive is quite an involved process. However, you do get taken on a walkthrough which does a very good job of breaking down the installation into easy to understand chunks, and it guides you through all the following steps.

1 - Install the Base Stations

• Base Stations: These are the units that track where in the room the controllers and headset are and which way they are pointing.
• Room Scale: This is the feature that allows you to actually walk around in games. You can define a safe area (that you have to clear of clutter) and then this transforms into a space in games you can also walk around. You'll also see references to "Room Scale VR" which is defining the experience of walking around in a virtual world, as opposed to just sitting down with a headset on. Also you may see references to "Room Scale Space", which is the real world you have created to walk around in.

Base station mounted with bracket

The base stations are the first thing you install, and they do form the first of the few sizeable challenges you may face when setting up your VR system. As Room Scale is one of the few feature differences between Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, hopefully you did your research into what space in your home you can dedicate to VR. So when I say first challenge, I'm assuming you already solved the space problem.

No, the first challenge is how you set up the base stations themselves. The trick is, they need to be 2 metres high, which isn't something I became aware of during my own research! The second trick is, they need to be near mains sockets.

The instructions suggest you might be able to use speaker stands, but I've got speaker stands for my Creative Surround Speaker system and they don't go anywhere near high enough, barely over a metre. So, the other solution is to actually mount the speakers on the wall, which probably means drilling holes.

Luckily, HTC do expect this, and you get 2 simple but effective mounting brackets to go with the basestations, so you can just place it on the wall where you want it to go, draw your drill points on the wall through the screw points with a pen, and then get the drill out and do the business. The brackets come with rawl plugs, but these are for plasterboard walls. If you've got plasterboard then these will be perfect for you, but if you are drilling into brick, like me, you can just use regular wall plugs if you happen to have them (which I do).

I don't have a mains socket in one corner of the room so I do have an ugly power extension cord there at the moment, I need to fix that in the future.

So once you've got your base stations up and powered on, the instuctions do mention making sure they are on opposing channels, and there is a physical sync cable you can use if the base stations can't connect to each other wirelessly, but the base stations were set up and worked straight out of the box for me.

2 - Install the Link Box

• The Link Box interfaces between your PC ports and your headset. You plug in video, USB and power one side and your headset plugs into video, USB and power the other side. You might ask what's the point? It's needed because your link box is plugging into video, USB and power in 3 different places, your mains socket may be a metre away from your PC, and your USB and video ports might not be right next to each other either. The Link Box presents them all together for your headset so actually the 3 connections merge into one cable and you are dragging 5 metres of only 1 cable behind you with the headset as opposed to three 5-metre cables.

Link Box stuck to the top of my PC

Installing the Link Box is where you have your other main challenge. Installing the Link Box is pretty trivial, especially with the instructions, except for one thing....

You need your monitor and VR system both plugged into the same graphics cards, but many graphics cards only come with one HDMI port (as mine does, an Asus GTX 970 card).

The Link Box does have a Mini DisplayPort you can use with a DisplayPort on your graphics card, but the HTC Vive doesn't come with it.

So actually, this had me stuck. A DisplayPort to MiniDisplayPort is easily available on Amazon for £5 to £8, but you have to wait another day! In the end, I jumped out to Argos and bought a quite expensive DVI to HDMI cable, I plugged my monitor in using that and used the HDMI port for the Link box.

So actually, out of the entire unboxing and installation process, the lack of a DP to miniDP cable is the only bugbear I have about the whole setup. Looking online, this is by no means a rare problem, with many VR capable cards only having one HDMI port, so quite why a £759 piece of kit can't include a DP to miniDP cable as well as an HDMI cable, I don't know.

I also felt like a bit of a tool because before I ordered the Vive, I stuck my head under my desk and round the very dusty rear-side of my PC and thought "Yup, 2 HDMI ports, great." Wrong! That second port was a DisplayPort!

A final good touch to note about the Link Box. You attach 5 metres of fairly heavy-duty headset cable to this thing, and the Link Box is really light. To help you solve this problem the Link Box comes with a double-sided black adhesive pad to stick the Link Box to something. I'm lucky in that my PC was perfectly situated to have the Link Box stuck on top of it, so I quite liked that little feature.

The good news is, the rest of the installation is plain sailing

3 - Install the Headset

• It's probably quite self explanatory, but the headset is the main point of why we are here. The headsets contains two 1080x1200 resolution displays, each with a lens to enable your eyes to focus on them at close range. The headset also contains a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, which you can plug the supplied (rather naff looking) earphones into if you like, or you can do the audio justice and plug in your own half-decent quality earphones for proper sound. The headset plugs into power, HDMI and USB 3.0 sockets on the Link Box, but these multiplex into a single heavy-duty 5m cable that is robust enough that you don't have to panic when (not if) you stand on it whilst playing.

This is as simple as plugging in the cables to the Link Box. As I say above, the HTC Vive does come with a fairly crappy looking pair of earphones, which would suffice to get up and running, but really I think if you are spending £759 on a VR system, you really do owe yourself a favour and should at least buy a basic pair of Sennheisers off of Amazon, why scrimp on the audio?

At this stage you might argue for HTC including more than a crappy sear of earphones, but this is par for the course in this cost cutting world. Take a look at all those iPhone users that use the provided Apple earphones (which are junk, and don't get me started on the wireless ones for the iPhone 7).

Anyway, headset installation - complete.

4 - "Install" the Controllers

Two mains sockets for 2 controllers?

Actually, you only need to turn them on. But there is a small gotcha here. The mains-to-USB plugs you get in the package to charge the controllers with... only have 1 USB slot per plug, so you have 2 plugs to use up 2 sockets? Why can't we have one plug with 2 USB sockets?

At some stage I'll check the power ratings for those and buy a dual USB socket plug. I mean, at this stage we are using 5 mains sockets, 2 for the basestations (where at least it makes sense), 1 for the Link Box and 2 for the controller chargers. I don't know about you but it didn't occur to me to check how many mains sockets I had before buying this thing.

5 - Install the Software

The software installation is not that difficult, but it could be easy to get lost in it because there are 2 or 3 stages to it. Luckily the walkthrough process makes it completely easy, and in fact directs you to install some software in the background whilst you are doing other stuff, which is a nice touch to stop you waiting around for your internet to keep up.

Unless you've been living under a rock these past years or somehow you are brand new to PC gaming (good luck to you in that case), you already have Steam. In which case you need to install Steam VR, which is as easy as installing any game on Steam.

In fact, you also install VivePort as part of this process. I kinda understand why HTC wanted their own shopfront, Oculus have their own that they like to jealously guard, but really I would have much preferred if it could have all been done in SteamVR. I have enough problems with managing seperate game installation clients as it is, Steam I like, GOG is okay, Origin I could do without (but resigned myself to for Dead Space 3) and now I get Viveport as well.

Summary

So overall, you'll look back on the installation process and think "Wow, that was a lot of steps", but as I said earlier the Vive setup process does a really good job of taking you through it step by step, so it wasn't overly problematic, it just takes a bit of time.

All in all, the real problems with installation are only the logistical issues of the 2m height for the base stations, the second HDMI port and the number of mains sockets you need. The actual putting together of the product couldn't really be any easier considering how many parts there are.

Hello & HTC Vive - Out of the Box

Introduction

Hello everyone, to my brand new blog.

I've been considering starting a blog for some time. Partly inspired by my wife, who has been running her own blog for 6-12 months, and partly because I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things and would probably enjoy getting that out there.

What has stopped me until now is considering what would make my blog interesting to anyone versus anyone else's. If I maintain a blog I want to know it's of interest to at least some folks, so I'm not really happy to just write about the same old crap as someone else or just have a blog offering opinions with no substance. Why does anyone want to read my thoughts on Brexit or Trump or anything else as opposed to the millions of other people on social media who like to infect the world with their nonsense?

So I've been waiting for that "killer app", which I now have, in the form of an HTC Vive headset. The VR industry is very new, really only 1 year old from the customers' perspective, and still too expensive for most people, and so I feel here is an area where I could help inform people about some things that might be of particular interest.

So there's a point to note about me, I do love my gadgets. I also love my car, and my house so maybe I'll talk about those later as well.

I should hasten to add I also love my wife above all else of course, but I'm not going to start writing blog posts about my wife so that's why she didn't get a mention before now (hello wife).

I've been building up to buying the HTC Vive for several months, which has given me time to:

1. Do a lot of research
2. Try out some cheaper stuff whilst I build up to the expensive full blown VR system

Right now I've had the headset for only 3 days and I already have loads to talk about, so expect my first few blog posts to be on this subject.

So... heading into blog post #1 properly like.....

HTC Vive - Out of the Box

Very First Impressions

HTC Vive Box in the Delivery Box

Having dropped £759 buying this from PC World (and not Game, another blog post there), anyone would obviously be keen to be reassured that they can see where their money went, and first impressions are good.

The box itself looks good quality, opening it up reveals a introduction note on the top, underneath the note is a nicely padded interior with many sections containing the many pieces of equipment. So it is quite a joy to take all the pieces out and inspect them one by one. A quick inspection of the note is urging you to go to a website to walk you through the setup process (another blog post, spot the theme).

HTC Vive Box - Exciting!

Most of the bags are mainly opaque, you can only see a little of the interior, but it's obvious which bag contains the headset, so obviously you'll head there to get a great first view of the main piece of kit you spent all that money on.

Overall, I must say, HTC have done a great job of laying out the packaging so that you continue with the sense of excitement (and relief) to make you happy that you just spent so much money.

Introduction Note

 

What's in the Box

The highlights are:

• The introduction note right on the top, referring you to website to walk you through the setup process.
• The main headset of course
• The other main pieces of equipment are the 2 hand controls, 2 room-scale trackers and the video/USB junction box.



Nicely laid out contents

• And you also get a lot cables and plugs in various bags as well

Overall, you get a lot of bags of equipment, and you might start to get daunted as to how complicated this is going to be to setup, but I can assure you now, you can place your faith in the walk through process. The most complicated bit, and definitely something you should consider, is the requirements for room scale. Regarding the hardware, it is the problem of setting up the room scale trackers. The reason this is tricky is that you either need 2 metre tripods or be handy drilling holes. There are one or two other major points regarding setup, but you can check my blog post on that for more details.
All I will say now is I did find one very important thing missing from the box contents that may be a stumbling point for many people, and that is a DisplayPort to Mini DisplayPort cable. More to cover there when I talk about installation in the next post.

You might also ask why I bought the HTC Vive rather than the Oculus Rift, considering the price drop and hand controls added to the Rift. There'll be more on that later as well.

Overall

The HTC Vive does say "quality", which is what you'd expect for the cost, but nonetheless it is still gratifying to actually get it. I'm not so easily impressed myself, I like to think I take a more objective viewpoint than most, which is why I say that as well as generally being happy myself with the grand opening of my latest investment, I can see that clearly a lot of thought has gone into the design of the packaging and the overall experience of the user when they first unveil their latest gadget. The VR industry is still very young, and a lot of doom sayers will tell you it will go the way of 3DTV, so it is vital that this stuff sells to people as much as possible. It's good to see HTC doing well here.

Coming Soon

Stay tuned for more exciting installments of Work to Live. :)

• HTC Vive - Installation
• HTC Vive - First Few Days Impressions
• VorpX - Any Good? (Your Older Games in VR)
• No Wonder Game Are Struggling
• Google Cardboard - How Does it Compare to Full VR?