If you room space is not big enough for a full room VR experience, the setup guide will tell you, and you cannot move forward. Some fine adjustment on the room scale and the green box signifies the room is big enough for a room sizes VR experience.
When complete, you have a headphone test. We used headphones and our test systems speaker set up, both worked well, but the speakers were not as immersive as the headphones, obvious really, but we’d thought it was worth a go.
Finally, and with more Steam animations, the setup guide instructions you to put on your HTC Vive, put on your headphones and then pick up your controllers. A short and impressive virtual room appears, very much in the style of Valve’s Portal.
Test Experience
We have included a short portion of the setup VR room as mentioned in the video below. The rest is a short montage of SteamVR, The Lab, Fantastic Contraption and Audioshield.
So what did we think? We recorded this with the X99 setup, so it’s not a graphical powerhouse due to the GTX 970, but it was strong enough to give an excellent VR experience. For us this is the HTC Vive’s strongest talent, and it’s almost Nintendo Wii in look, feel and style. We can’t fault the Vive or the SteamVR, both give a smooth and immersive experience that underpins that VR is all about.
Due to the graphical nature of the games and applications, we didn’t experience any real screen door effect (SDE), though some of the outdoor scenes in The Labs “Postcards” did get a little grainy due to the photo realistic renderings. The Lab, Fantastic Contraption and Audioshield all compensated nicely for any SDE, blur or bleed due to the style of the graphical rendering. It worked very well.
HTC Vive Virtual Reality Headset Review
Package - 9
Performance - 6.5
Price - 5
Consumer Experience - 5
6.4
As diehard VR fans we were left as disappointed with the HTC Vive as we were the Oculus DK2. Though these should be a generation apart in development, and we appreciate they are from different companies, using the Vive hardware with the types of games we like, and not bespoke to the Vive, it still felt like a beta product.
