What is the Vive?
The Vive is Valve’s new Virtual Reality (VR) headset that is set to compete with the Oculus Rift in 2016. It has one VR headset, two room sensors and two hand controllers (one for each hand). To set it up, you place the sensors on the ends of the area you want to designate for play. A 4×4 foot area is needed but an 8×8 foot area is suggested for the best experience. The hand controllers are the size of sword handles and are considered to be “One to one movement,” meaning they perfectly follow your real world hand movements while you move them around in the virtual world.
You can find more technical specifications here at Valve’s website.
What Is The Experience?
At the “VR Austin Meetup: September 2015 Edition” at the North Door here in Austin, TX, several companies had a showing of their titles using the Vive. There was a large amount of space designated for the Vive on the show floor, with the device’s room sensors placed on poles about 8 ft above the ground. There was a two hour wait to try the Vive experience, due to the length of the demonstrations, but it was worth it. Almost immediately after putting on the goggles and grabbing the controllers, I felt like I was in a completely different world.
The room sensors were tracking my hand movements and my physical location in the world space inside the game. In other words, when I walked around, the game knew where I was.
In the game I played, you guide planes to a runway and do other tasks that help make the airport run smoothly. It was amazing! When I was guiding them, I was in the air, and the perspective made me feel like a giant grabbing onto planes in a very intuitive way, I did not need to guess if I was grabbing the gameplay objects; it just worked. Other parts of the game changed the perspective so that I felt like I was a normal-sized person, I put out a few fires on some planes that had landed and also scared off seagulls that got in the way of the planes landing. The game was amazingly fun and it was only one of the five awesome game titles being shown. I was having too much fun and I lost track of time. It turned out that I had been playing for a good fifteen minutes!
Vive Vs Oculus Rift
Comparing Vive directly to Oculus Rift, the current trend setter in virtual reality headsets, there are some major differences and strengths. The Vive requires a large amount of space to be effective, which to be honest, not many people have in their living rooms or bedrooms. With the Oculus you’re mostly stationary at your desk and use your mouse or gamepad to move around. The games shown for the Vive seem to stay within a virtual space created by its sensors, meaning you can only move around in the space created by the Vive. The Oculus seems to be more geared for use with most games out in the market, similar to a close up monitor, and with the Vive’s ability to let you physically move around, companies will need to develop games specifically for it.
The choice is yours to decide what to get when both devices are released to consumers in 2016. If you have the space and want to truly feel like you’re in a virtual world out of the box, I suggest checking out the Vive when it’s demonstrated, the experience might be the only thing keeping you from joining the future of VR.
About Meta 3D Studios
Meta 3D Studios, founded in 2005, is an application and game development company in Austin, Texas that creates custom-branded interactive experiences for clients, including Discovery Channel, Mattel, and Syfy Channel. Meta 3D Studios services small- to large-sized game and app clients with their interactive product, art, and animation needs, and helps to launch hundreds of diverse projects worldwide. Visit our Case Studies for more information about Meta 3D Studios and how we work with our clients.
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