HTC Vive is coming in May for the princely sum of buh, that’s £689 to you and me plus £57.60 for shipping, holey moley.
We all know the £499 price point of the Oculus Rift, which seemed insane compared to the development kit that was around £240 including shipping. But the HTC Vive is making the Rift look like a total bargain, especially as yours truly is getting his for free ^^.
So what is VR and which one should you get?
Virtual Reality headsets are the new console wars, except its hardware for a PC (not entirely accurate), which by the by you need a good PC too, we’re talking modern i5 processor at like 3.3Ghz and a GTX 970 graphics card.
For the most part VR gives you an immersive experience, I mean the field of vision is incredible, and how head movements relate to in game head movements makes this come alive, it’s easy to forget you’re just sitting at your desk when you’re trying to check something out in the virtual world, it’s only when you bang your head you’re like, oh. This is the one thing that the Vive definitely has on top of the Rift, and that is the camera that can overlay part of the real world when obstacles are about to become a problem. Personally I think I’ll tether the Rifty beauts to a longer cable and lye on the couch hehe.
So what games can you get, and where?
Well the HTC Vive is partnered with valve so the Steam store will totally have you covered for games supporting the Vive. And the Oculus Rift has it’s own store too but that doesn’t mean oculus ready games won’t show up on steam, Gabe Newell has said in an email to somebody that he doesn’t have a problem with competition.
As for actual games, the rift has kind of support for things like Alien Isolation which I may start again on PC for the full terrifying effect, but there is also full support in games like EVE: Valkyrie, Edge of Nowhere, The Witness, Elite Dangerous and of course Minecraft which some are touting as the killer game for VR.
The Vive as some games too, nothing major looking at the moment I don’t think.
at the minute to me, this IS looking different from attempts to launch VR in the past – but it still doesn’t look a dead cert. What’s different appears to be the tech as it seems the hardware is actually decent. not just the headsets, which are clearly better than any of the massive contraptions or poor res stuff of the past, but obviously also the processing power that means the games are actually worth looking at. i read some thing on the Oculus site saying the headset has to produce two thousand by thousand frames, HD at 90 frames per second. that’s hardcore.
buuuuuut… the bit that’s missing does seem the games. i mean, there are some decent looking ones there and all but… what you really need is for it to just be compatible with, well, everything. speciality tech just has a horrible history where it’s inaccessible…
still very tempted though.
Yeah this is the thing, I mean it’s early days, and to think developers started making rift games like four years ago when the kickstarter happened, I mean doom bfg edition was suppose to be free to backers and have rift support, I don’t know if it did, but there’s a new Doom coming out it was so long ago. But once people have VR and there’s a market for the games to have that functionality then they’ll come, but do all games need it? I’ve recently started playing Skyrim again as I wasn’t that far into it on the xbox or PC, and there is a mod that you can use and 3rd part software to make it display like a rift, I’m not sure if I’ll install all that though just to be immersed, I mean it’s still a great game on a 2d screen.
I see there’s a fork of the Dolphin emulator to play Game Cube and wii games, and I think I saw something about a nes emulator doing something similar, but again, is it necessary.
Xbox one is going to be compatible through a Win 10 PC but that’s suppose to be like sitting in a theatre watching it on a big screen rather than immersion, which is kind of the whole point of VR, that said, you never know if I’ll end up watching movies on it as my primary device lol
I think it all comes down to Minecraft, as everyone who experienced it with the Rift recently loved it. So a £1000 PC and a £500 Rift (not that I paid that) is a fair chunk of money for Minecraft lol. At least I needed a future proofed beefed up PC.
Which reminds me, today’s task is put the model 2 and 3 emulators on it