Vive: Makes Oculus look like a viewmaster (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 16:39 (2888 days ago)
edited by Cody Miller, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 16:48

This is the Oculus after spending some time with the Vive. I still think VR has a very long way to go before we get an AAA experience with it, but with the Vive I feel like the range of possible genres with which to do that is significantly larger than the Oculus. The biggest problem with the Oculus is that you are stationary, and that you must use a controller. Vive fixes these by giving you motion controllers and by allowing you to move.

First, the motion controllers are really cool and amazingly appear exactly where they should be. You won't have any trouble picking them up, and they enable interaction that is much more natural. The Valve demo lab had very good interaction, and picking up and moving stuff was very easy. Other games have varying degrees of success. If you have trouble manipulating objects in the world, then it's the game's fault, not the hardware's. Unfortunately, the demo lab was probably the BEST in terms of immersion and seamlessness that I was able to play, with all third party games being much less refined. At least I know it's possible.

Being able to walk around is HUGE. You do not know how much this improves the experience until doing it. It's completely natural. Absolutely second nature, to the point where if you go back to Oculus it feels completely wrong. There was a mini golf game for Vive I played that worked exactly how you'd expect: you could walk around your ball, examine the play area, etc. The larger your room the more you can move before hitting a wall. The Vive puts up a transparent mesh to let you know when you're going outside the bounds of your room, and games have options to move you via teleport if you need to go farther. It's pretty seamless. Again, it makes Oculus look like total shit. I can't stress how much this improves the experience.

The demo lab had several presentations with actual animated characters, and I was surprised at how cool it was. It felt very 'real', but I still knew my brain was being tricked.

The mini golf game was great, and I think the Vive could do adventure games or dinner murder mystery type experiences very well. I think something like PT on the VIve would never get released because too many people would be shitting themselves out of fear.

The biggest problem is that while the movement is crucial to an immersive experience, you are constrained by several things. The first most obvious is your physical room space. You can only walk so far before you hit a wall. Thus, all the games have a teleportation mechanic when you can point at an area and instantly jump to it. The second, is that you can't physically interact with the game geometry. You can walk through tables, and sloped surfaces are a huge problem. This is unfixable unless you can somehow have shit rise out of your floor on demand to create physical replicas of the terrain, which is not happening in the near future or possibly at all for home use.

The last problem is more fixable, but still a huge pain in the ass and that's the cables. Vive needs to go wireless. You quickly get tangled up, and there's way more cables going into the headset than Oculus. While mini golf was cool, I was constantly fighting the twisted mess of cables on the floor and around my body.

The Vive also has a much smaller field of view than the Oculus, and it is rounded instead of rectangular. You feel like you are looking through a snorkel mask. No VR system I have used so far has filled my entire field of view. I don't know why they are making these small ass screens and cutting off my peripheral vision. You do not get used to it, and it constantly makes the experience claustrophobic instead of immersive.

Bottom line: Oculus fucked up with no motion controls or ability to let you walk around. I had some cool experiences with the Vive, but they are essentially either gimmicks or minigames, which is fine because they were fun for a bit, but it's not going to be a staple gaming experience any time soon.. I think maybe in 15 years we can start having quality AAA experiences in something like adventure games, and maybe within a few years in something like Flight Sim or Racing.

But we will never get Uncharted 4 in our lifetimes or anything remotely close.