The Vive, which is based on a VR platform made by the gaming company Steam, is what you might call fragile. I also mean the cost, in effort and in frustration, of the complexity. And I don't mean just the actual cost of the Vive Pro HMD, which at $1199 is very pricey, considering that price doesn't include the cost of the base stations, the controllers, or the fairly high-end PC you need to run it all on. No other VR system does it so well.īut all that comes at a cost. Some use the controllers to give you virtual arms, that look like your own arms (except maybe wearing a space suit), and that move in the virtual world in time with how you're moving them in the real world.Įspecially with the new Vive Pro HMD, which is smoother and far more comfortable to wear than the original Vive HMD, you'd almost swear you had virtual limbs. It's mind blowing, and it means that, once the controllers are in your hands, you can do all sorts of things you can't do in other VR gaming systems. You can walk across the room, bend over to pick the controllers up, and the physical controllers are right there where your hands are grabbing for them. But because the Vive system knows precisely where the controllers are in the room you've set up, accurate to a what must be a centimetre or two, it's able to depict them in the virtual world with a high degree of realism. You can't see anything of the real world. With your headset on, you of course can't see the actual controllers. The way the physical handheld controllers are tracked and replicated in the virtual world is especially impressive. But it makes for the best VR system we've ever used. It's kind of like GPS positioning, only using infrared light instead of radio, with only two satellites, and limited to a space no bigger than 5 metres between the base stations. Sensors on the headset and on the handheld controllers look for infrared pulses and laser sweeps coming off the base stations, and then use those signals to calculate their precise three-dimensional location inside the space. You could spend an hour figuring out errors in the Vive system for every hour you spent inside the virtual reality it creates (and that's roughly the ratio we spent) and you would still endure it with a smile on your face. The HTC Vive Pro would be magic if errors weren't always popping up, pulling back the curtain and reminding you that it's just virtual reality.īut there is something about the Vive, a virtual reality system unlike anything we've encountered elsewhere, that makes you stick with it through all the errors. Over the years we've certainly had devices that were as difficult to get working as the Vive system, but in all of those other cases, we decided it wasn't worth the effort and we gave up. You'll get an idea of just how troublesome it might be when I tell you what the system entails: a head-mounted display (HMD) that now, in the Vive Pro HMD, has almost twice the resolution of the original Vive HMD from two years ago a pair of controllers you hold in your hands and wave around a pair of base stations which track the movement of the HMD and the controllers in the real world a small box which connects all of that to your PC's graphics card and two or three apps which run on your PC, on top of which apps you run virtual reality games you download using the Steam gaming system. Honestly, in more than a decade of reviewing gadgets, I don't think we've ever encountered anything as troublesome as HTC's Vive gaming system. A complete list of the things that went wrong while we were using the Vive Pro would take up this whole review. I also welcoming conversation about VR, and games that may or may not be on steam.That's only a small sample of the errors. I know this may not help the OP, or anyone who has commented thus far, but perhaps others who run into the same problem like we have.ītw shoot me a PM(+)Friend request if any of you play Hordez, Hover junkers, Airspace, or any of the other MMOs currently out for vive :) I will add, I experienced the same problem with mine, and it happened a few times, first time I tried fudging it with a laptop that used a gtx 960 (desktop card ver), which is insufficient power lol, but the second time I experienced it was on my current rig with a 1070 in it, the issue for me was resolved by tweaking display settings in my PC and doing a few power cycles, as well as reinstalling steamVR and Vives own software for it. Ideally your Vive should be plugged into HDMI, I'm not sure what it's support is for display port options, I also had no knowledge it could be run via DP instead of HDMI.
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