Valve HTC Vive VR Headset announced. Spring devkit, holiday consumer release

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Valve HTC Vive



Cool stuff! Specs and details are thin, but it looks like they're handling Motion Tracking different and have a solid input design already good to go which sounds like some sort of two wiimote controller things or something.

Should be bunches of more info at GDC next week.

 

Very awesome!!! It kind of sucks that I'm not at GDC because I definitely want to get my hands on one of those Dev Kits ASAP ;-)

 

As someone who owns a DK2, I am very skeptical about the resolution.
So apparently we're working with 1200x1080 per eye here. That's merely 25% more than the DK2 which has a huuuuuuge problem: It's literally impossible to make proper user interfaces with that thing.
You either use huge text and symbols that are projected right in your face, or you have a problem on your hand.

The really important question is this: RGB or PenTile.

 

I've scheduled a demo @ GDC and I will *definitely* be getting a dev kit.

Hopefully this will help out the VR game I put up on Steam Greenlight a couple days ago: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=400067527

There was a discussion with at least two commenters who said VR was a "gimmick". Maybe now that their beloved Valve is going full force into VR they'll change their opinion!

 

Sweet

The same concerns that are flooding other VR hardwares are definitely here too. I think it's going to be really hard to make any clear verdicts until they release more information at GDC and (if they choose to) address the major concerns like the screen specs.

 

I'm still quite concerned that we'll have to make a ton of different builds, one for each headset we want to support.

And the difference between the headsets is more than just resolution etc. The Rift looks one way, and then the same app on the VR One (w/ iPhone 6) looks completely different -- not because of the pixels, but because the optics act differently, so the experience is completely different. Speed of movement ends up feeling different because of what I Think is a perceived focal length difference in the headset.

 

@sfbaystudios - I think you are correct, in general at least. I don't have the luxury to play wit ha device, do people have to make separate builds for Oculus? It just sounds a bit strange to me though, shouldn't it be enough to include the necessary libraries, create a common VR manager class and a file with settings for each device that you support?

Here is a link to the official HTC Re Vive website

 

idk how it'll all shake out, but right now each device has it's own SDK. The Rift has one, the Cardboard has one, "OpenVR" I think is a thing and has one, VROne has one... Each is slightly different.

So the Rift, for a while, needed to have it's code hacked a bit to offset the rotations if you wanted to use a gamepad to rotate the player. They fixed that, which is great, but the VROne sdk still requires that. So unfortunately you need to know what device the player is on and then write code for each one specifically. It's possible to do it, of course, it's just annoying as hell.

And then, of course, the optics of each device are different.

VR/AR will benefit much from some standardization, I think.

 

I guess the ideal would be if Unity would have all those "small adjustments" built into the platform. After all it's "the multiplatform engine"

 

Yeah -- but they don't have small adjustments for all the current platforms Building for iOS and building for Mac, to actually send to apple for sale, are completely different processes. Most of the iOS is built in, but very little of the mac is, and a lot (in my opinion) has to be done, including stuff via the terminal, to get it working properly.

The VR stuff though, all that is moving so fast, changing so fast, it doesn't really make sense to nail down any one thing. I hope that users -- developers and players -- simply demand some level of cross-platform support.

 

Or history. History is written by the victor, and the battle is only beginning.

 

This seems to become a rather big thing

Valve’s VR Experience Is the Closest Thing to the HoloDeck We Have

I hope Unity VR will support it very soon ;-)

EDIT: Oh, and even better - read this: VR isn't a gimmick anymore (kindly pointed out by @yezzer and on Reddit)

 

There was also a really talk on design issues with that setup (SteamVR / Lighthouse / HTC Vive):

Valve - Virtual Reality in 2015

 

Sony's VR device is also a good one>-<

 

Whatever the porn industry takes , that will be the victor, history has shown this in the past....

 

They are just a display technology, adapted from mobile phone technology.

What they do need is to go wireless and the VR equivalent of OpenGL or OpenVR so you can change between HMD's.

Although their melding with from mobile phones tech could mean that they just need hi def wi-fi / bluetooth and they would work with any graphically capable rig or on their own.

 

Sony Project Morpheus is definitely an interesting device - and it's discussed here: Morpheus: Ahead of the Curve?

At the moment, it looks to me like SteamVR / Lighthouse / HTC Vive is the most promising approach because it allows for continuous presence. Of course, that comes at a price (probably both financially and how much room you need in your "VR-room") ... but I'm definitely willing to pay for that ;-)

 

What about lighthouse enabled spaces and mobile VR!

Rooms, office space, sporting arenas could become near holodeck style experiences?!

And with VR recording you could go to a sporting arena and see a replay of the game in VR!

 

Judging from some of the comments in and around that article, I don't have much confidence in the author.

OVR has the majority of attention and the largest commitment all around. I think Valve/HTC has the most innovative approach at the moment but this is really all just stage 1 for this field of tech.

Like mentioned before, it needs to be wireless and have a wonderful input device (hands) which at this time hasn't been sorted out entirely. There's some good solutions, but everyone agrees on the basic point that there are vast improvements that need to be made, and are likely coming as the tech develops.

 

is there some news about unity support for vr head visors and valve's vive in particular ?

 

Haven't heard anything official yet, but the Partner List on the HTC website has quite a few Unity developers on it, so it's likely in the pipe.

 

I went to Valve on Friday and went through the 23 minutes demo.

Summary:

1. The proto hardware is very good and despite the low resolution and pixel flicker, the low latency and hand controls make the immersion very natural.
2. Hand controls speed up the way you solve puzzle 10x.
3. Most of the demoes had pre-canned interaction, old gameplay mechanic, static world and linear story and it stood out as the wrong way to do VR.
4. As a passive observer, VR is also amazing.
5. Most demoes had a virtual representation of the room limit, those who didn't felt weird when you hit the boundaries (literally).

 

Yeah, meanwhile, there's a SteamVR Unity Plugin available on the Unity Asset Store.

Unfortunately, it still says:

... so I have to move my main development to Windows for a little while, I guess (well, at the same time, Unity 5.1 has direct VR integration for Rift, which isn't my primary target platform but it's what I also already have a DevKit for, so it's a tricky situation - I hope that eventually, they'll have native support for SteamVR in Unity because as far as I can see, that's the platform of the future).