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.