HTC and Valve headset

The_Valeyard

HTC and Valve are teaming up to make their own VR headset


Could be very interesting.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/1/8127445/htc-vive-valve-vr-headset

Skerries

yeah just reading about it on Reddit

especially if this is true

Oculus Rift: 960x1080p x2, at 75Hz.
HTC/Valve VR:1200x1080p x2, at 90HZ.

The_Valeyard

Skerries wrote: »

yeah just reading about it on Reddit

especially if this is true

Oculus Rift: 960x1080p x2, at 75Hz.
HTC/Valve VR:1200x1080p x2, at 90HZ.

Does look good, but valve have promised greatness in the past and hasn't worked out that well....

Big Knox

I would imagine this should make it to production relatively quickly too compared to the rift.

Either way multiple VR options is good for everyone!

jumbobreakfast

Very interesting but I think oculus still have the lead and may announce something this week too. It's interesting that the marketing for Vive is leaning towards a standing rather than the seated experience that Oculus have been focusing on so far.

ScumLord

The_Valeyard wrote: »

Does look good, but valve have promised greatness in the past and hasn't worked out that well....

It looks like their controller is being adapted to work with this headset and if it takes off they could find the market for all their tech.

jumbobreakfast wrote: »

It's interesting that the marketing for Vive is leaning towards a standing rather than the seated experience that Oculus have been focusing on so far.

Yeah, they seem to be promoting a room experience. They seem to have a more elaborate motion tracking system which can maybe factor in the size of your room and where the obstacles are.

Lukker-

It's good news for consumers anyways, more VR choice will drive innovation and lower prices.

Lukker-

Sierra Oscar

Looking forward to more information being revealed at GDC, especially a time-frame for its release.

Lukker-

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

Looking forward to more information being revealed at GDC, especially a time-frame for its release.

Dev kits within the next 3 months and they are aiming for Christmas this year for a full release.

Dyr

It's an exceptionally ugly looking piece of kit but why the hell are the inputs on the top of it? Does'nt make sense

http://www.cnet.com/uk/products/htc-vive-developer-edition/

I don't care give me a VR tool for il2: cliffs of dover and I die happy

Shiminay

All those dents and bumps look like tracker related stuff - wonder if there's gonna be some sort of complimentary sensor device?

gazzamc

Let's see how much it is first, oculus lost a lot of support after facebook acquired them.. So valve being valve can throw anything out and win support, the specs sound good though.

Captain Chaos

gazzamc wrote: »

Let's see how much it is first, oculus lost a lot of support after facebook acquired them.. So valve being valve can throw anything out and win support, the specs sound good though.

facebook basically killed my interest in Oculus stone dead. I'm looking forward to this and Sony's Project Morpheus.

gazzamc

Captain Chaos wrote: »

facebook basically killed my interest in Oculus stone dead. I'm looking forward to this and Sony's Project Morpheus.

Same for myself, I was about to buy a dev kit until they bought it.. I don't want anything to do with it now, I can see them making it casual, or adding FB support or some stupid ****.

Dyr

Shiminay wrote: »

All those dents and bumps look like tracker related stuff - wonder if there's gonna be some sort of complimentary sensor device?

There's a valve base station for sensing whole body movement

Kiith

Will it work with existing Rift compatible games is what i'd like to know. If we need a whole new wave of games, it might struggle to take off over the Rift with it's current catalogue.

Dyr

Any word on specs for running this? I'm going to guess that two (three?) screens at 90hz is going to require a goodly amount of hamsters and wheels

cadete

razer have theirs on the way aswell
http://www.osvr.com/

Skerries

It's like real life TF2 where we have to collect all the VR hats

Grumpypants

Sweet can't wait to hook this up to my Steam box and play Half Life 3..........

jumbobreakfast

Bambi wrote: »

Any word on specs for running this? I'm going to guess that two (three?) screens at 90hz is going to require a goodly amount of hamsters and wheels

No but some sort of dual GPU setup would probabaly be required for top-end settings. Valve said that they get almost double the performance using AMD's new dual GPU liquid VR setup which is good considering that normal SLI/crossfire only gets you up to 1.5 times the performance in a standard game. Normal SLI also adds input lag into VR games as there is a slight delay when trying to keep the two GPUs in sync which some people are not bothered by but many others have complained about it.

Perhaps AMD or Nvidia will release a budget (ish), dual GPU card optimised for VR?

There's a talk here explaining other tricks that Valve are using to increase performance:
http://www.roadtovr.com/valve-talks-advanced-vr-rendering-live-blog-5pm-pst/

ScumLord

Good interview with the developer, it's based on lasers and has accuracy to within fractions of a millimetre. They say you can walk around and as you get close to real world objects they'll start to appear in game so you can avoid them.

It's a completely different way of doing it from oculus.

fergus1001

Htc teased us with half life and then went back on it.... I hope they rot in hell

Dyr

A bit off topic, I dont get any selling point for a steam machine now that they have the link box (or a super long HDMI cable I guess)

Skerries

hands on with the controller

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqXn5DNN21w

gizmo

Bambi wrote: »

A bit off topic, I dont get any selling point for a steam machine now that they have the link box (or a super long HDMI cable I guess)

Folk moving to PC gaming, possibly for the first time, who may have a laptop for general productivity and neither the space for a full desktop in their living room nor an inclination to own a more powerful rig elsewhere in their home.

Alternatively, people with poor home networks, PCs that are too far away from their TV in general and for folk whom 1080p60 streaming isn't good enough.

ScumLord

I really like the Valve way of doing it. It looks like a simple way of solving a lot of latency issues. I think I'm leaning more towards the HTC headset, although I get the feeling it's going to be much more expensive so I'll have to wait and see if it's even affordable. Right now I can't really decide how much I'm willing to spend above €500 on a good VR headset. I'm probably going to have to buy a new card along with the headset and I'm not long after upgrading to a GTX 770 and I don't know that a second one would be sufficient.

Dyr

ScumLord wrote: »

I really like the Valve way of doing it. It looks like a simple way of solving a lot of latency issues. I think I'm leaning more towards the HTC headset, although I get the feeling it's going to be much more expensive so I'll have to wait and see if it's even affordable. Right now I can't really decide how much I'm willing to spend above €500 on a good VR headset. I'm probably going to have to buy a new card along with the headset and I'm not long after upgrading to a GTX 770 and I don't know that a second one would be sufficient.

Apparently valve were demoing with a GTX 980 and saying that people should by no means think that it was only an entry level card for their VR

fergus1001

Htc :

Half life

Three

Confirmed

smithy1981

I think Valve's lighthouse system make VR arcades more appealing. Not everyone is gonna have the money or space required for some these setups, but its something I simply must have/try

kearneybobs

It's probably worth Necro'ing this thread since Valve have released a toll to see if your PC is VR ready. Doesn't check for USB compat/suitability but here's my results.
Might be worth a Mod changing the title too.

jumbobreakfast

kearneybobs wrote: »

It's probably worth Necro'ing this thread since Valve have released a toll to see if your PC is VR ready. Doesn't check for USB compat/suitability but here's my results.
Might be worth a Mod changing the title too.

nice result. you only need 1 usb 2.0 port for the Vive I think

Antar Bolaeisk

Pre-orders up on Steam now, for a measly sum of €1,000! :eek:

gazzamc

Antar Bolaeisk wrote: »

Pre-orders up on Steam now, for a measly sum of €1,000! :eek:

It's only $700 in the US, that's a rip off.. I'll wait for later revisions.

Kiith

€1000 is absolute bull****. You'd be able to fly to the US and buy it there for less then that.

Zillah

Kiith wrote: »

€1000 is absolute bull****. You'd be able to fly to the US and buy it there for less then that.

Well that's not true.

Kiith

$700 is around €650, and you can occasionally get to the states for less then €350. You might not get home, but i never said that :P

Seriously though, it's crazy that $700 somehow equals €1000. Even adding tax and/or import costs, it should be nowhere near that much.

Dyr

For that delivery price I want mine to be delivered by Lord Gaben in person. On the back of winged unicorn

Duggy747

Antar Bolaeisk wrote: »

Pre-orders up on Steam now, for a measly sum of €1,000! :eek:

A grand!?!


I'm on board the VR train but I'd be quicker to put that kind of money towards building a new machine. I figure I'll be waiting a few years for the next iteration when I'll probably have a new machine anyways and they have the VR tech refined more.

jumbobreakfast

Kiith wrote: »

$700 is around €650, and you can occasionally get to the states for less then €350. You might not get home, but i never said that :P

Seriously though, it's crazy that $700 somehow equals €1000. Even adding tax and/or import costs, it should be nowhere near that much.

The dollar price is without tax so when converted and tax added it comes to about €900 which is the actual price listed on steam, not €1000.

The delivery comes to €74 which is strange alright but some people reported being able to select standard shipping for £5 (not sure if any Irish people got that option). Perhaps they made a mistake with the shipping options

Overall, it's in line with the oculus rift price since that does not have motion controllers or room-scale tracking.

Zillah

jumbobreakfast wrote: »

does not room-scale tracking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXrJu-zOzm4

I think Oculus' biggest PR failure is to allow this false notion to perpetuate to the point of being taken as fact.

It's even happening in articles from games journalists. It's starting to get aggravating, people are so desperate to qualify the difference between the two major headsets that they're inventing differences where there are none.

There are different emphases, sure - but that's not the same thing. They're basically the same product.

Skerries

the OR is getting the Chaperon system so there must be room scaling on it

jumbobreakfast

Zillah wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXrJu-zOzm4

I think Oculus' biggest PR failure is to allow this false notion to perpetuate to the point of being taken as fact.

It's even happening in articles from games journalists. It's starting to get aggravating, people are so desperate to qualify the difference between the two major headsets that they're inventing differences where there are none.

There are different emphases, sure - but that's not the same thing. They're basically the same product.

My post was in the context of price comparison ie the Vive without the motion controllers and only 1 lighthouse would probably cost the same as the Rift. But since we're on the subject..

The Oculus Rift kit at the moment requires a USB connection for the constellation camera so they may run into problems with max USB cable length. The Vive lighthouses are dumb so only require power (no pc connection) therefore you can have them in opposite corners of the room to limit occlusion when you have your back turned. Reporters who tested the room scale demo from Oculus said that they lost view of their controllers when they had their back turned to the Constellation cameras. Oculus will do room scale somehow otherwise they won't compete long term.

My biggest concern with the Vive atm are the reports of fresnel lines appearing in the lenses with certain in-game lighting.

4068ac1elhodqr

Good article about it here
Mentioned a good idea which is to avoid '1st gen' devices, unless wrapping in clingfilm (unopened) and placed in the attic as a future antiquity.

Vive looks great on paper with twin handsets and wall sensors.


Higher-end Estate Agents are certainly interested in depolyment to sell their overpriced houses.

Might brush up on the coding and 3D environment creation software, as this technology will almost certainly replace an awful lot of current tech interfaces within 5yrs.

gazzamc

jumbobreakfast wrote: »

The dollar price is without tax so when converted and tax added it comes to about €900 which is the actual price listed on steam, not €1000.

The delivery comes to €74 which is strange alright but some people reported being able to select standard shipping for (not sure if any Irish people got that option). Perhaps they made a mistake with the shipping options

Overall, it's in line with the oculus rift price since that does not have motion controllers or room-scale tracking.

Still pretty pricey given you'll probably need a high-end pascal card to run it well (or the higher end of maxwell/980Ti)... I'll be waiting on the later iterations and just upgrade the rig so i'll good to go when the time comes, unless something happens that changes my mind.

Zillah

gazzamc wrote: »

Still pretty pricey given you'll probably need a high-end pascal card to run it well (or the higher end of maxwell/980Ti)

I don't think anyone is in a position to say exactly what the high or low end of Pascal is going to be. However, it looks like they'll be releasing the higher end first, which is said to be a replacement for the Titan brand, which would put it far away above the recommended spec for VR.

My bet is that the lower end of Pascal is going to be 970 territory.

FAILSAFE 00

Any killer games going to be available for the Vive?

I am starting notice some of games that look very interesting are Rift & PSVR with no mention of Vive.

Coyote

one of my first buys i think.
http://www.adr1ft.com/

Zillah

It's only $20 apparently.

Wetbench4

Pretty similar results for me with a R9 290..
SteamVR.png