Vive Pro Launch

[Sniperfox47]

7 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

A bit off topic but what on Earth ever happened to the Rift? It was the next big thing for several years and then HTC just went "got ya bitch" and beat them to the punch and was way better. That's my interpretation at least. 

 

It seems like the Vive is where its at and nothing coming from the other team. What the hell happened?

The rift launched. And it's currently a cheaper less premium alternative.

 

There were all kinds of controversies over content locks on it and locking down the ecosystem.

 

It's currently more popular than the Vive, even on the Vive's homeground of SteamVR, because consumers are dumb and short sighted.

 

The Rift definitely didn't disappear.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

37 minutes ago, Rune said:

Boink

As expected, Facebook ruins everything

[Drak3]

10 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

A bit off topic but what on Earth ever happened to the Rift? It was the next big thing for several years and then HTC just went "got ya bitch" and beat them to the punch and was way better. That's my interpretation at least. 

 

It seems like the Vive is where its at and nothing coming from the other team. What the hell happened?

Rift came out, and its controllers were far better, by enough that IMO, thebRift was the better overall package.

Oculus also advertised their price drop as part of VR summer last year.

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

A bit off topic but what on Earth ever happened to the Rift? It was the next big thing for several years and then HTC just went "got ya bitch" and beat them to the punch and was way better. That's my interpretation at least. 

 

It seems like the Vive is where its at and nothing coming from the other team. What the hell happened?

Many has already given you a answer, but to be blunt, Vive came and said "got ya bitch".

Even today with nig discounts and pricedrops Rift manages to be just barely cheaper when you want the same features as in Vive (at the moment Rift with 2 extra sensor costs 587€ and Vive 599€ and for the room scale with Rift you need at least 1 extra sensor and with my experience then it barely works, with 2 extra sensors it works). Also Rift became troublesome piece when Vive came out and people wanted at least try the room scale and while costing more than Vive your PC in some cases couldn't run Rift in room scale (you need USB3.0 port per sensor for the best result and even then some cheaper USB hosts just can't handle enough data and become bottlenecks), not even talking about back then Rift being more expensive room scale VR platform, IIRC normal Rift package back then didn't even include the controllers.

 

Facebook did drive some developers away from Rift, but in my opinion bigger thing was Valve jumping behind Vive and providing plugins for game engines and bending a lot of their rules for publishing games in Steam for VR games (VR games didn't need to go through the greenlight process at all, just put your game to the Steam and send one email and your game is published and even now there's a ton of assetflips and other garbage in Steam from that). Probably the last nail in Rifts coffing was ReVive, which allows any Oculus game to run on Vive and even if there was projects trying to do the same other way around, it was just impossible to do. In the start one of the biggest sell points to the Rift was Robo Recall and first thing to do when Epic published the modding capabilities was to make Robo ReVive and that selling point was nullified. Also today Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, is personally supporting the ReVive project just because reasons (IIRC 2k$/month as long as they make ReVive to work natively, with Vives own drivers and not hooking up to Rift drivers and emulating Rift) (IMO tells a lot about about in which state Oculus is at the moment when it's creator is backing a project to bring every "Oculus only" game to the competitor).

 

Everything just falls down to pure luck and backing. While Rift is lighter, has better screens and better controllers, Vive was more whole package and gained more developers behind it, and mainly Valve behind it (while Steam supports Oculus games, it's same kind of support as with UPlay and Origin games have, you need to have the Oculus software installed and every game runs through it). Also it's a lot of empty big promises that was made for Vive and to some extend delivered (like Steam Knuckles to bring Oculus Touch-like controllers for Vive (some developers got them in early 2017, some in summer 2017, but no promises when they will acctually come), and the Vive trackers with their limitless possibilities, as long as you can get enough of them (VR guns, full body tracking, physical objects in VR and so on)).

 

On the real topic:

 

Friend of mine pre-ordered his Vive Pro right away, can't wait to test it. But probably I will personally skip it as long as original Vive is supported and I'm too far more interested in playing with Leap Motion and other more nieche stuff in VR than the improvements of Vive Pro.

[RagnarokDel]

4 hours ago, violentnumeric said:

lol no obvious paid shilling there

You should get that shirt you silly goose. https://teespring.com/shop/StupidStupid#pid=369&cid=6514&sid=front

[porina]

As Vive owner, I'd love the extra resolution, but that price is a bit much for me. 

[Drak3]

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

you need USB3.0 port per sensor for the best result and even then some cheaper USB hosts just can't handle enough data and become bottlenecks),

Only 3.0 for 2 sensors. Any additional sensors run just fine of of 2.0.

[Sakkura]

11 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

...it is... The only thing "better" is the Samsung Odyssey, and there you have the crappy Windows MR controllers.

The Oculus Rift is better than the HTC Vive in most ways, and still cheaper even with the price drop.

 

The Vive Pro is really cool, but $799 is pretty stiff when it doesn't even come with controllers and base stations. Fine for actual Pro stuff, but not for regular consumers (beyond a small niche of enthusiasts).

10 hours ago, Trixanity said:

A bit off topic but what on Earth ever happened to the Rift? It was the next big thing for several years and then HTC just went "got ya bitch" and beat them to the punch and was way better. That's my interpretation at least. 

 

It seems like the Vive is where its at and nothing coming from the other team. What the hell happened?

The Rift is dominating the market at the moment. Surpassed the Vive even on Steam now.

[Trixanity]

I guess I stand corrected. I don't follow VR too much but it just seemed to me that Vive is the only one in the news and the one people recommend. But of course my perception seems to have been skewed.

[Sniperfox47]

1 hour ago, Sakkura said:

The Oculus Rift is better than the HTC Vive in most ways, and still cheaper even with the price drop.

In what universe?

 

The displays on the two are nearly identical other than the ones on the Vive having a slightly wider colour space.

 

The Rift requires literally 4 times the USB ports on your machine.

 

In sitting play they're about equal for tracking, maybe slight edge to the Rift for ease of setup, but for full roomscale the tracking on the Rift is iffy, requires more base stations to be set up and configured to work reliably, and even then supports a smaller play area.

 

The controllers on the rift may be comfier but again in room scale they have the same issues with tracking.

 

And none of that even starts to mention all the corporate BS with Facebook since they acquired Oculus, vs HTC who has contributed a not-insignificant amount of manhours to both SteamVR/OpenVR and OpenXR to push forward for an open VR/AR ecosystem...

 

Edit: Oh yeah, and there's the forced Async. Reproj. on the Rift with titles from their store due to their framework forcing it...

[Asche]

To have installed my Vive in random location for demo (LAN for example), i find it pretty easy to setup after all.

You just put the base station somewhat facing each other, use one Wand controller to set the edge of the play area, and.... done.

I mean, how could it be more straightforward ? (Yeah ; that the base station scan the room ofc )

[Sakkura]

4 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

In what universe?

 

The displays on the two are nearly identical other than the ones on the Vive having a slightly wider colour space.

 

The Rift requires literally 4 times the USB ports on your machine.

 

In sitting play they're about equal for tracking, maybe slight edge to the Rift for ease of setup, but for full roomscale the tracking on the Rift is iffy, requires more base stations to be set up and configured to work reliably, and even then supports a smaller play area.

 

The controllers on the rift may be comfier but again in room scale they have the same issues with tracking.

 

And none of that even starts to mention all the corporate BS with Facebook since they acquired Oculus, vs HTC who has contributed a not-insignificant amount of manhours to both SteamVR/OpenVR and OpenXR to push forward for an open VR/AR ecosystem...

Color space is the same. The Rift has slightly higher pixel density in return for slightly narrower FOV. The Rift has a larger sweet spot.

 

The Rift requires no more USB ports than my 5½ year old $90 motherboard provides.

 

Roomscale tracking on the Rift is perfect, and has slightly better occlusion resistance than the Vive if you add more sensors. The play area available with 3 sensors is more than what almost anyone will be able to set aside anyway, and even bigger with 4 sensors.

 

The corporate BS with Facebook has been less than the corporate BS with HTC and Valve. HTC were the ones trying to get ads in your VR experiences to track whether you looked at them.

 

Oculus is a founding member of the OpenXR working group. Valve initially wanted to push their own OpenVR API instead, which delayed the launch of the OpenXR working group to December 2016.

[mynameisjuan]

I have both the Vive and the Rift.....

 

I never use my Vive anymore since I got the Rift. Better headset, better speakers, tracking on par with 3+ sensors, if not better and the biggest thing is the controllers. Im sorry but the Rift kicks the shit out of the Vive controller wise. 

 

If only the Rift was supported by more games on steam though  

[Sniperfox47]

5 hours ago, Sakkura said:

Color space is the same. The Rift has slightly higher pixel density in return for slightly narrower FOV. The Rift has a larger sweet spot.

 

The Rift requires no more USB ports than my 5½ year old $90 motherboard provides.

 

Roomscale tracking on the Rift is perfect, and has slightly better occlusion resistance than the Vive if you add more sensors. The play area available with 3 sensors is more than what almost anyone will be able to set aside anyway, and even bigger with 4 sensors.

 

The corporate BS with Facebook has been less than the corporate BS with HTC and Valve. HTC were the ones trying to get ads in your VR experiences to track whether you looked at them.

 

Oculus is a founding member of the OpenXR working group. Valve initially wanted to push their own OpenVR API instead, which delayed the launch of the OpenXR working group to December 2016.

The Rift and the Vive displays do not have the same color space coverage. Play a brightly coloured high contrast game and do a side by side comparison. It goes beyond the Vive display just being calibrated more vivid.

 

If you're playing on a modern enthusiast desktop sure. Laptops? Mainstream consumer desktop? Older desktops? Many don't have 3 USB 3.0 ports like their requirements suggest.

 

All of my evidence for tracking issues and the rift is anecdotal or that of friends so I'll take your word that the experience is better than I've seen. In my experience it's had a ton of trouble with any rooms that are IR heavy or where the base stations have any kind of IR emitter  between them. There was another user earlier in this thread who was complaining about similar issues, so I felt it was justified to mention my own issues with it.

 

Whats wrong with Ads as long as they're not overly intrusive? And measuring if you look at an Ad in VR is the literal equivalent to measuring mouseover on the web. It's a analytics tool for measuring engagement to tell if an ad is even worth putting out. I'd much rather have a world with non-intrusive Adsense style ads in my headset than a world where certain VR titles are locked to certain headsets where I have to have 6 different headsets to have access to all the titles I'm interested in for absolutely 0 technical reason.

 

And I don't know where you get your information about Khronos but all the info I've heard from mailing lists are that the Oculus team are yanking people around and leading to further delays. Just because they were a member of the working group from the start doesn't mean they've been contributing to it positively.

[Cookybiscuit]

2 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Whats wrong with Ads as long as they're not overly intrusive? And measuring if you look at an Ad in VR is the literal equivalent to measuring mouseover on the web. It's a analytics tool for measuring engagement to tell if an ad is even worth putting out. I'd much rather have a world with non-intrusive Adsense style ads in my headset than a world where certain VR titles are locked to certain headsets where I have to have 6 different headsets to have access to all the titles I'm interested in for absolutely 0 technical reason.

I'm sure either of those would go down swimmingly, especially considering the current mass criticism VR attracts. People aren't going to spend $700 to play shitty bow and arrow games full of Burger King advertisements.

[Sniperfox47]

1 hour ago, Cookybiscuit said:

I'm sure either of those would go down swimmingly, especially considering the current mass-criticism VR attracts. People aren't going to spend $700 to play shitty bow and arrow games full of Burger King advertisements.

People pay $700 on gaming PCs to play Facebook games on webpages covered in ads. You'd be surprised how little the average users cares about ads as long as they're not super intrusive.

[Sakkura]

1 hour ago, Sniperfox47 said:

The Rift and the Vive displays do not have the same color space coverage. Play a brightly coloured high contrast game and do a side by side comparison. It goes beyond the Vive display just being calibrated more vivid.

 

If you're playing on a modern enthusiast desktop sure. Laptops? Mainstream consumer desktop? Older desktops? Many don't have 3 USB 3.0 ports like their requirements suggest.

 

All of my evidence for tracking issues and the rift is anecdotal or that of friends so I'll take your word that the experience is better than I've seen. In my experience it's had a ton of trouble with any rooms that are IR heavy or where the base stations have any kind of IR emitter  between them. There was another user earlier in this thread who was complaining about similar issues, so I felt it was justified to mention my own issues with it.

 

Whats wrong with Ads as long as they're not overly intrusive? And measuring if you look at an Ad in VR is the literal equivalent to measuring mouseover on the web. It's a analytics tool for measuring engagement to tell if an ad is even worth putting out. I'd much rather have a world with non-intrusive Adsense style ads in my headset than a world where certain VR titles are locked to certain headsets where I have to have 6 different headsets to have access to all the titles I'm interested in for absolutely 0 technical reason.

 

And I don't know where you get your information about Khronos but all the info I've heard from mailing lists are that the Oculus team are yanking people around and leading to further delays. Just because they were a member of the working group from the start doesn't mean they've been contributing to it positively.

The color space is the same. The Vive displays have higher max brightness, while the Rift displays have deeper blacks.

 

"Modern enthusiast desktop" doesn't really describe my 2012-era mainstream platform. It is an older desktop, over 5 years old (apart from the GPU). Still has 4 native USB 3.0 ports.

 

I don't think the ads are a big deal, but I'm pretty sure there would have been a massive uproar if Oculus (ahem, Facebook) had done the same thing.

[mynameisjuan]

1 hour ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Many don't have 3 USB 3.0 ports like their requirements suggest.

I brought this over to a friends who had only usb 2.0 and it worked flawlessly. Just like how the HDMI has to directly in a HDMI port but I had a DP adapter. So it can work outside of spec!

[Thaldor]

5 hours ago, Sakkura said:

I don't think the ads are a big deal, but I'm pretty sure there would have been a massive uproar if Oculus (ahem, Facebook) had done the same thing.

Probably the big uproar would have been because it would have been Facebook, which doesn't give a penny for privacy and everyone would have known that ads would have been extremely intrusive and annoying. HTC at least doesn't have that kind of track record and there's at least some possibilities that they can make something not as intrusive and annoying what Facebook would do.

 

These ones are so specific uses for VR and so much goes to the area of being pitch black, hidden and experimental, but few things that Oculus can never do:

Multiple play areas in single room without separating and/or having stuff in the way. At the moment we have in our office 4 Vives for development, but only 2 lighthouses, usually there's just 4 small play areas, but we have the option to use one huge play area (~6x10m, SteamVR doesn't support it with chaperones, but no problems to track the full area).

Connecting playspaces, Vive don't seem to mind for which Vive each lighthouse belongs and can connect to multiple lighthouses without problems, with this in theory (haven't tried it, yet) you can do playspaces that cover multiple rooms, this is something that I know quite few developers are waiting for.

Peripherals, I don't know how far you would need to dig into and is it even possible to dissamble Touch-controller and turn it into something like a gun or just something like the Vive tracker (most of the VR guns even use the systems own controllers, like ProTubeVR, and then there are those that are made from a controller, VR-15. and then there are those with their own systems) and could Rift even track more than 2 controllers and a headset in the first place.

 

And just to point out, my home rig with Vive would be probably a lot more messier and expensive with Rift. I could loan Rift and probably most of the needed hardware from the work, but going through the trouble of setting up 3.5x4.0m play area (just big anough that with Oculus I would need 4 sensors, at least officially) with Oculus seems just stupid with the need of having long active USB cables while with Vive I have just perfectly power outlets under the lighthouses.

[Sakkura]

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

Probably the big uproar would have been because it would have been Facebook, which doesn't give a penny for privacy and everyone would have known that ads would have been extremely intrusive and annoying. HTC at least doesn't have that kind of track record and there's at least some possibilities that they can make something not as intrusive and annoying what Facebook would do.

 

These ones are so specific uses for VR and so much goes to the area of being pitch black, hidden and experimental, but few things that Oculus can never do:

Multiple play areas in single room without separating and/or having stuff in the way. At the moment we have in our office 4 Vives for development, but only 2 lighthouses, usually there's just 4 small play areas, but we have the option to use one huge play area (~6x10m, SteamVR doesn't support it with chaperones, but no problems to track the full area).

Connecting playspaces, Vive don't seem to mind for which Vive each lighthouse belongs and can connect to multiple lighthouses without problems, with this in theory (haven't tried it, yet) you can do playspaces that cover multiple rooms, this is something that I know quite few developers are waiting for.

Peripherals, I don't know how far you would need to dig into and is it even possible to dissamble Touch-controller and turn it into something like a gun or just something like the Vive tracker (most of the VR guns even use the systems own controllers, like ProTubeVR, and then there are those that are made from a controller, VR-15. and then there are those with their own systems) and could Rift even track more than 2 controllers and a headset in the first place.

 

And just to point out, my home rig with Vive would be probably a lot more messier and expensive with Rift. I could loan Rift and probably most of the needed hardware from the work, but going through the trouble of setting up 3.5x4.0m play area (just big anough that with Oculus I would need 4 sensors, at least officially) with Oculus seems just stupid with the need of having long active USB cables while with Vive I have just perfectly power outlets under the lighthouses.

Yeah Facebook has a (deserved) reputation. Still a little sceptical of potentially judging HTC so differently.

 

There are definitely niches where the Vive is better. Another one is if you use glasses and they don't fit in the Rift (some may not fit in the Vive either, but at least it has more room so your chances are better).

 

Why would you take apart a controller and turn it into a gun? Makes no sense when it already lets you mimic a hand in VR, which can hold both guns and all kinds of other stuff. Use for tracking other stuff is possible but more limited than with Vive trackers due to size/layout. I think Oculus was technically first to market on that point with Rock Band VR tracking your guitar using an attached controller, but it's definitely not as good of a solution for general usage.

 

On the other hand, tracking all kinds of objects might not be a great idea when you can just have hands in VR to track anything you could possibly (or impossibly) hold. Trackers make more sense to me if they're tracking other body parts (feet etc.), but then I'm not sure if VR is really ready for that anyway. Lower priority probably, and not something I'd want to spend money on right now. YMMV.

 

3.5x4.0m is a huge play area. The Rift tracking system does start to look a bit silly with that kind of area available, but then it isn't really designed for that, and the vast majority of people won't have that much space set aside for VR. It was 3% of Vive users by June 2016, and the figure will only have gone down since then (as VR expands beyond the most hardcore enthusiasts).

 

https://steamcommunity.com/app/358720/discussions/0/350532536103514259/

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Why would you take apart a controller and turn it into a gun?

Ever play a VR game with a rifle or shotgun in it? Total immersion breaker when your hand can phase right through it when you want to hold it.

[Sakkura]

13 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Ever play a VR game with a rifle or shotgun in it? Total immersion breaker when your hand can phase right through it when you want to hold it.

Use 2 controllers with an adapter.

[Asche]

6 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Ever play a VR game with a rifle or shotgun in it? Total immersion breaker when your hand can phase right through it when you want to hold it.

I dont mind it.

[Cole5]

This is pretty neat, hopefully the Standard will drop even more, i want to play ED in Vr

[WereCat]

I was waiting for the Vive Pro but when I saw the price with no accessories... well, today I have received a new Oculus + touch.