Hands On With the HTC Vive: Is Today's Best VR Good Enough?

The more important question may be this: is virtual reality good enough right now to make you place an order?

Light up the screen, step into another world.

That line sounds like an IMAX ad, and it is the future most tech giants want to bring into your home today — by way of a virtual reality headset.

Google has its Daydream project, Facebook bought Oculus, Microsoft and Sony have each built a VR headset for their own game console, and Apple has hired a batch of people in the field.

But judging by the products actually on sale, the two closest to the goal of "virtual reality" are Facebook's Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive.

The surprise is that Oculus, which started earlier and has Mark Zuckerberg behind it, ran into serious production problems, while HTC, which has lost money for years, got a product to market first. So what is the first mass-produced consumer virtual reality product actually like to use? Here is what we found.

Setup Takes a While

The HTC Vive box holds a headset, two motion-tracking controllers, two laser base stations, and an assortment of accessories and cables. The Vive tracks you around the room through this set of sensors mounted on the wall.

Where you fix the two base stations decides how big the Vive's usable play area is. The manual says the two base stations must go on the diagonal of a rectangular play area — that is, in two opposite corners of the room — and no more than 5 meters apart.

The two base stations need to sit a bit above the user, facing each other and tilted slightly down. Because a laser base station has a 120-degree field of view, neither the mounting angle nor the tilt has to be precise.

You can bolt the base stations to the wall, or stand them in two corners on a tripod with a standard thread — in theory that gives you a play area about 2.8 meters on a side. In practice a cable trails behind the headset, so the space can't be much bigger anyway.

The base stations aren't heavy, so if you can't drill into the wall, tape or double-sided adhesive will hold them. Each laser base station also comes with a power adapter and needs its own outlet.

The rival Oculus Rift works differently: it has a single tracking base station that sits on a desk. The base station looks a bit like a small microphone — when you play, you just set it on the desk facing you.

So the Rift can only be played sitting down, with no walking, but setup takes no effort and needs almost no space: a chair and a desk are enough.

Putting It On and Setting It Up

Once the base stations are up, the rest of the installation is easy. A ribbon cable trails from the back of the Vive headset and splits into four plugs: a round DC power connector, a USB, an HDMI, and a 3.5mm audio jack that takes headphones directly. The other three go into a breakout box, which keeps the cables tidy and can also send video out over DisplayPort, useful for a PC with no HDMI port.

The link box does something simple: it gathers the cable connections in one place so they don't tangle. The box also comes with an adhesive pad, so you can fix it down — which makes moving around in VR work better, since the cables won't pull loose.

Once the cables are in, remember to charge the two controllers. The controllers HTC ships with the Vive use the same tracking technology as the headset: the ring at the top is studded with tracking points, which is what makes motion tracking work. The front of each controller has a circular trackpad with one button above it and one below. When you grip the controller there's a trigger under your index finger, plus two more buttons on the sides.

Don't put the headset on yet — first you need software on your PC. The HTC Vive was developed with Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming platform, and it plays Steam games.

Steam now has VR support built in: click the VR icon in the top right corner and SteamVR, which the Vive needs in order to run, downloads, installs and updates itself.

HTC also offers an official Vive app, and you can follow its prompts step by step. But this official app, built to accommodate players in mainland China, is not good to use — it freezes and crashes often, and the store inside it carries very few usable VR programs and games.

Once the fiddly preparation is done — updating the graphics driver, updating the headset firmware and so on — the next step is the first-time setup.

You can choose between standing in one place and walking around the room. If you choose to walk around, follow the tutorial and "draw" a rectangular space with the controller. That's everything. Put the headset on.

The First Thing About VR Is Whether It's Comfortable to Wear

The HTC Vive has much the same basic structure as other VR devices, Google Cardboard included: two lens assemblies for the eyes, plus a screen.

The Vive headset weighs about 500 grams, but the headband is sensibly designed — easy to adjust, not too tight against your face once cinched, and the load on your neck is bearable. Interpupillary distance is adjustable too.

On the whole, an hour or two of continuous use causes no discomfort. There is also plenty of room inside the Vive headset, and the distance between your face and the lens assemblies is adjustable, so anyone who wears glasses has nothing to worry about.

When you first start using it, if you look down on purpose you can see light leaking in around your nose: the Vive's nose guard doesn't press against your face the way the Rift's does. But that gap is what keeps the lenses from fogging up, which matters a lot. Once you're playing you won't notice it at all.

Shift your eyes' focus slightly and you can plainly tell that what's in front of you isn't a real world but a screen. The field of view isn't complete either — about what you get wearing ski goggles.

You can also see individual pixels with the naked eye, much like looking closely at an ordinary television or monitor. That's because the Vive's screen resolution is only 1200 x 1080, about the same as a mid-range phone, yet it's blown up to fill your whole field of view.

If you're used to "Retina" displays, the first look may disappoint you. But once the scene in front of you starts moving, you stop noticing such details.

Some design choices help you settle into this world faster.

The first is the controllers. In the display inside the headset you can see the controller in your hand. The base stations fix its position, and the image is then drawn in the lenses. How precise is the controller's movement? The lag is low enough to fool you into thinking you're looking straight at the controller with your own eyes.

The first time you put the Vive on, you feel an urge to lift the controller and "examine" it. The 3D model is finely made, and it even picks up different light and shadow in different environments. Pull the trigger, slide your thumb across the trackpad, and both show up on screen.

The second is motion tracking. However you turn your head, walk back and forth, or stand up and sit down, the scene in front of you changes with no lag the eye can catch. Your reason tells you what you're seeing is fake, and within a few seconds you forget it.

And a virtual world that feels real is exactly what virtual reality is after.

Precise motion tracking plus a 60-frames-per-second refresh rate delivers full immersion, and it also all but rules out motion sickness. On cheap VR devices that use a phone as the display, I could rarely last an hour playing a third-person or first-person shooter before nausea cut me off. In all the time I spent with the HTC Vive, that feeling never came.

Wearing the Oculus Rift isn't quite the same. The Rift's headset is noticeably lighter than the Vive's, so it burdens your neck less. But the Rift's eye area is fairly tight, which makes it hard to wear over glasses, while the Vive's headset is far roomier — it takes most ordinary glasses, unless the lenses are unusually large.

The Gaming Experience Is Already Astonishing

Launch SteamVR, put the headset on, and you see an opening scene: a patch of gray floor the size of the area you marked out, and empty space everywhere else.

Raise both hands, press the menu button below the trackpad, and the VR version of the Steam menu appears in front of you. It does everything Steam on your computer does — buy, download and launch games and apps — so you barely need to touch the computer again.

A few VR applications on Steam are must-tries. Each stands for an important kind of experience.

Google Tilt Brush

Tilt Brush is close to compulsory on any VR device, and it is one of the applications that shows off what the HTC Vive can do. Put simply, it's a drawing app — except you're not drawing on a flat surface, you're drawing in space.

In Tilt Brush the controller in your left hand becomes a rotating multi-function menu where you pick the brush type, the color and so on; your right hand is the brush. Pull the trigger anywhere in space and drag, and you paint the image you want in mid-air.

You can walk around and draw from any angle, and you can save the work and look at it from every angle afterward. Drawing in Tilt Brush feels a bit like being a human 3D printer — and better still, it's free on Steam.

The Lab

The Lab is one of the HTC Vive's demo pieces. The reason to recommend it is that this Valve-made application offers nearly every kind of experience virtual reality can currently deliver.

The Lab has a lot of interactive scenes. One has you draw a bow and shoot arrows, and it feels much as it would in the real world. Another has you pull open a drawer and watch a tiny figure dancing inside. A third has you run a tomographic scan on a human body with the controller and inspect its structure from every angle. All told, The Lab is a good way to introduce a newcomer to virtual reality and get them going.

How you move around inside The Lab's scenes deserves a word of its own. You can walk freely within the area you marked out, and as you near the edge a virtual wall appears as a warning. To reach somewhere you can't physically walk to, you hold down the trackpad and "jump" to a designated spot.

This is one of the ways virtual reality currently handles walking. It is a little counterintuitive, and next to the rest of the experience, which feels entirely natural, it jars badly — but for a game built around a large open environment, there are few other options.

Hover Junkers

Next to jumping around in The Lab, Hover Junkers offers a smarter, more intuitive way to move.

Hover Junkers is an online multiplayer first-person shooter. Set against traditional first-person shooters, virtual reality's weakness is obvious: you can barely walk. A shooter you can't walk in has no fun in it at all, and here is how Hover Junkers gets around that.

If people can't walk, or have only a small space to walk in, then make the floor move. In Hover Junkers the area you marked out becomes a small hovercraft: the left-hand controller works the craft's control stick, the right hand fires the gun. While you steer the craft freely around a much larger scene, you can also walk about your own craft and crouch behind the "console" to dodge enemy fire.

You can also pick your "craft's" design, and some designs come with cover built in for you to hide behind. This is what sets it apart from other simulated-driving VR games. In EVE or Elite: Dangerous, which also put you in first person piloting a spaceship or a vehicle, you yourself stay seated, with room only to turn your head.

Hover Junkers' answer is clever: it gives up neither playability nor the HTC Vive's knack for letting you move around a small space, and other games will probably borrow the idea. Hover Junkers costs 100 yuan, and it's worth it.

Universe Sandbox 2

The reason to recommend this last one is plain: pure immersion. As the name suggests, Universe Sandbox 2 began as desktop software for simulating the motion of celestial bodies, with a fairly small audience. But the latest version added a wholly new virtual reality mode, and that raised the game to another level: you become God.

Watching the solar system turn on your desktop, or a comet hit Earth, was never that thrilling. In virtual reality mode you are dropped straight into boundless space: the colossal bulk of the star VX Canis Majoris fills your whole field of view; the glare of Vega makes you raise a hand to shield your eyes without thinking, or even step back; you fly low over the surface of Mars and watch the shadow Olympus Mons throws along the line between day and night; drag two suns into each other and the nebula that erupts floods your view with color.

Whatever you can think of, you can do here. Picture it: you're lying on the floor watching a red giant in front of you shrink and brighten as you crank up the gravitational acceleration, until it finally blows off its gas shell and collapses into a black hole. Would you still think the 78 yuan was wasted?

Games Not Made for VR Are Barely Worth the Trouble

For a game that hasn't been optimized for VR, like Dota 2, there's "theater mode." Turn it on and you seem to be sitting in a cinema, with your computer desktop as the screen.

The mode is entirely a compromise. It looks like a new lease of life for games that don't support virtual reality, but it isn't practical.

VR displays are still low-resolution — 2160x1200 across both eyes, below what a high-end monitor does. And in "theater mode" most of that is spent drawing a cinema-like room, so the resolution left for the game image is pitiful. You can't even read the text in the interface.

The PC You Need Isn't All That Powerful

We drove the HTC Vive with a gaming laptop: an Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M graphics chip. That's slightly below what the manufacturer recommends.

In use, the great majority of games and applications gave the machine no trouble at all — the computer even stayed quiet. There was one exception: in Universe Sandbox, if too many collisions between celestial bodies appeared at once, or when stars collided and a nebula erupted, the frame rate stuttered. The first is probably a bottleneck in CPU computation, the second not enough power in the graphics chip.

The HTC Vive's 2160×1200 across both eyes isn't high. The lowest graphics chip that runs it smoothly is roughly a GTX 970, which puts a DIY PC in the 5,000-6,000 yuan range. SteamVR also includes a benchmarking program that gives you a rough idea of whether your computer can manage the VR experience.

The HTC Vive Isn't Mature, but It Is the Closest Thing to "Virtual Reality"

Set the HTC Vive beside the consumer Oculus Rift we tried earlier and the difference is this: the Oculus is still a device you control with a traditional Xbox One controller, where your character walks by way of the joystick — indirectly. The Oculus does capture your head movement, so the in-game view turns as your head turns.

The Vive virtualizes more of you. Your own walking shows up in the game, even if it is only walking around a cramped space.

The two are worlds apart in how you interact with them. It's like the difference between tapping buttons on an iPhone or Android screen and using the direction keys and a scroll wheel to pick buttons on screen, the way older Symbian and BlackBerry systems worked.

For games not designed specially for the Vive, you can also wear it and play sitting down, just as with the Oculus.

Browse VR games on Steam and you'll see that almost every game compatible with the Oculus Rift also runs on the Vive, but not the other way round: many Vive exclusives require motion-sensing controllers and a standing player.

In other words, the Vive is further ahead than the Oculus Rift.

The Question Is Whether HTC Can Hold On Until Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream

For anyone who wants to experience new technology, further ahead is certainly better. As a business it is not so clear.

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has explained why they didn't design the Rift to be used while walking around: he didn't want people thinking, before they had even bought one, "To use the Rift I'll have to clear out my living room, set up boundaries…"

That narrows the pool of buyers. Beyond sales, enough people have to buy the hardware to give game developers a reason to make more games suited to virtual reality. And using everything the HTC Vive can do takes considerably more development work.

On top of that, both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive are small markets to begin with. To use them you first spend 600 to 800 US dollars on the headset — 6,888 yuan for the version sold in mainland China — and then pair it with a PC costing at least 5,000 yuan.

As a rule, only players who love PC gaming will go that far. A market like that is still very early.

Virtual reality is not a single product. It is a platform — much as the first iPhone was, when even Apple did not realize it had built a platform that developers around the world would use to unleash their creativity.

The HTC Vive has pushed the form of games further than the Oculus has, and making a game with that kind of immersion is plainly harder. Most first-person games on the Oculus Rift can be adapted by tweaking the viewing angle, which is also what the Rift is after at this stage: satisfy gamers first.

Games for the HTC Vive will take longer to work out, and will need more promotion and incubation from HTC and Valve. But as with Sony and Microsoft backing game developers, incubating and promoting costs money and resources — and for HTC, this may not be a good moment.

With Facebook's advertising business getting stronger, Oculus has no worry about paying the bills. HTC's position is different:

HTC, which made its name in smartphones, has put at least half its resources into the Vive over the past year or so. Layoffs, selling buildings, cutting back on phone models — HTC is betting its future on VR.

So where does the HTC Vive's future lie? Judging by HTC's marketing and the market's response, games are not the only thing drawing interest.

Because the experience is further ahead, digital marketing companies have taken an interest in the Vive. HTC had no booth of its own at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this January, yet other companies used it to pull in crowds.

Intel, for one, had someone wear a Vive headset and paint.

A sleep-monitoring company set a Vive at the entrance to its booth so visitors could test their sleep quality, using a game about crossing a single-log bridge.

Others used VR to show virtual homes. IKEA recently put a kitchen-renovation app on Steam that drops you into a kitchen modeled on a real one, where you click to change the color of the cabinets and drawers.

Wuyou Wofang, one of the HTC Vive's first partners in China, has already put its virtual show-flat project into commercial use. Like the IKEA app, the idea is to let developers replace physical show flats with virtual ones.

Then there is virtual reality in the gym — wearing a headset on a stationary bike, where what you see might be a cowboy galloping across open country, or winged horses racing through the sky, which beats watching television while you work out. We tried Virzoom's VR fitness device at CES at the start of the year; it also runs on the Vive.

Teaching is another possible direction. Take Universe Sandbox, mentioned above: students can watch the motion of celestial bodies "up close" and get a feel for the size of stars against planets, which makes learning astronomy far more direct than pictures or video.

Game and app developers are HTC's highest priority. Since late last year, Vive has held three developer conferences with more than a thousand attendees each, announced an "accelerator program," and set up a fund of more than 100 million US dollars to help developers make content. They have also run a VR content contest with prizes of up to 100,000 yuan.

HTC is even considering making content itself. At this year's Computex Taipei, its "internal innovation team" will show its first VR game, FRONT DEFENSE. Until now, most games on the Vive platform came from third-party developers.

How the first consumer Vive headsets are being shipped says the same thing. QDaily has learned from several game developers that HTC ships to developers first, then to enterprise customers, and only then to consumers.

One detail shows that order of priority: hardware for commercial users — that is, for offline experience venues — is priced above 8,000 yuan, higher than the 6,888-yuan retail version. The premium buys technical service, with HTC taking responsibility for calibrating and repairing the product to the end.

For a company that needs the HTC Vive for demonstrations or as part of a solution, a few thousand yuan is no barrier at all.

Even if virtual reality does become the next platform on the scale of the smartphone, it will not happen in a year or two. Until then, commercial use may be the only market HTC can lean on.