HTC's Vive will cost $799, ship in early April
I don&#x27;t understand how people claim that Vive is currently &quot;superior&quot; to Oculus.<p>The approach that Oculus took on virtually every aspect is better than what HTC&#x2F;Valve went with.<p>It will launch at 600$ which is 200$ and while it comes with a traditional controller (more on what it&#x27;s a good thing below) it doesn&#x27;t matter as much as the pricing does getting more stuff only works when the prices are equal when they aren&#x27;t the cheaper device wins.<p>It launches with a traditional controller which is the most important aspect of this as it comes with a control scheme that both gamers and developers are familiar with which will help to bridge the gap while developers work on good motion &#x2F; acceleration control scheme for their games.<p>If we take the Wii for example then allot of the early games came out with traditional controls and through out it&#x27;s life span even 1st party games from Nintendo continued ship with traditional controls only for titles that motion controls didn&#x27;t made much sense for e.g. Smash Bro&#x27;s.<p>The OR Xbox 360 style game pad is something that everyone is used to and knows how it works, it means that developers can focus on utilizing the VR aspects of OR instead of trying to work extra hard on making a more complicated control scheme work. Traditional gamepads are also considerably more easy to implement for seated gameplay which is how most consumers will end up using it any how.
Sure a whole AR&#x2F;VR room size experience might be cool for 15-30min ala Lazer Tag but no one will have that at home.<p>On a side note playing with both Vive&#x27;s and OR&#x27;s touch controllers OR wins here too, the Vive one isn&#x27;t as comfortable especially for mixed control schemes which is what even the best motion controlled games eventually opt for.<p>Now tracking, people say that the Vive tracking is superior it&#x27;s not really, you can stack multiple (upto 50 in the SDK iirc) OR cameras to track multiple players across a large room, from talking to people that were interested in large scale installations (5+ players in a single room) OR is pretty much the only way to currently go because the camera setup can correctly directly track multiple players without any interference.<p>And it&#x27;s not like room scale VR is going to be viable both are still tethered headsets in all of the demo&#x27;s I&#x27;ve been through there was a guy behind each player which was pretty much holding the tether ensuring that it won&#x27;t tangle or snap off and that the player wont end up on the ground or with the tether around their neck. The installation of a single frontal camera is easier than installing the lighthouses as far as a home setting go, people are used to the Kinect and the Sony Eye cam, the OR camera could also be used for additional full body tracking and object recognition.<p>Overall as far as build quality and comfort goes the OR is more comfortable (subjective) the rift is considerably lighter and the weight is much better distributed meaning it sticks in it&#x27;s place better I had issues with the Vive wobbling which can cause major issues for people who suffer from borderline VR&#x2F;Motion sickness, the OR also comes with great built-in headphones which are definitely of high quality the sound quality from the demos I&#x27;ve experienced as well as the overall noise isolation is about the same level as my Shure premium earphones, the Vive took the bring your own headphones approach which doesn&#x27;t work well as it puts limit on the size, shape and strap of the headphones and even in the demos it didn&#x27;t seem like they&#x27;ve managed to find a perfect fit.<p>On the software side Oculus also has a big advantage they were first and they&#x27;ve scored most developer deals atm, since Oculus is also what drives Samsung VR (which I actually own and even it is superior to Vive as far as comfort and many other things go) and they also plan to licence their software and hardware IP to other companies it looks like Oculus will have the better support out there.<p>Sorry Valve but Vive atm seems more like a me-too product than a true innovator and industry leader, their bet to go with HTC is also problematic for the long term aspects of the Vive since HTC is in quite a bit of financial trouble.