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HTC Vive: Stepping onto the holodeck

At Gamescom we sampled a number of demos with HTC Vive, and came away impressed by the hardware and feeling like Lilliputians.

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While Valve weren't on hand at Gamescom to demo Vive, their partners in VR - HTC - had set up a modest booth in one of the public halls of Kölnmesse. Inside show goers and press were privy to a selection of brief demos and a slightly longer experience entitled "Secret Shop" created by Valve.

HTC Vive: Stepping onto the holodeck

As this was our first proper hands-on with the Vive, the SteamVR controllers and the lighthouse stations that allow tracking of body movement inside a rather spacious area (5 by 5 metres) our focus was almost entirely on the hardware and its performance during the first couple of demos. There was an underwater scenario capped off by a huge Blue whale swimming by, and there was a balloon demo where you picked the colour of the balloon by moving your finger round the haptic pad, then inflated it by pulling the pad's trigger. We then sent the balloons flying by hitting them with our controllers. It felt very natural and lifelike, even if it was a simpler version of the same sort of object interaction we experienced with the Oculus Touch demo.

Next came one of the highlights. Maybe not the most impressive piece of interaction but in this demo we were able to paint lines (colour chosen with the haptic dial) in a 3D space. What was the first thing we drew you ask? Why our names, of course. It was a quite surreal and magical experience walking around and looking at what we had written from all sorts of angles. It was surprisingly accurate, and as the demo continued we experimented with drawing characters in the 3D space. Of course, if you add the potential of 3D printing to the mix (something I'm sure the developers have thought of) there could be some really useful applications, but even as a distraction it proved very entertaining.

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During our demo we experienced some issues with one of the SteamVR controllers, as it kept getting disconnected for some reason. Of course, this was an early version of the hardware and software and our demo handler feverishly sought to fix it. It's expected though, and normally we wouldn't make much noise about it, but this actually lead to one of the more powerful realisations of just how immersive this is. My colleague who sampled the last demo after me was only given one controller as the other one kept getting disconnected. Yet at one point when the demo got a little intense he was swinging his left arm a few times (without a controller) before realising his mistake. Our handler smiled, "I've seen that sort of thing a lot", he noted.

One thing that separates the Vive experience from Oculus is the rather large area that the Lighthouse stations tracks your movement within. The room was custom-built to allow for the best possible experience (which also meant plastic foam on the walls). When you approached a real world wall a blurred grid would appear in the demo to let you know you were about to walk into it. It still happen on a couple of occasions during the 20 minute demo that we brushed up against a wall. You really do lose all sense of space outside your headset and it was really only the cables that would sometimes restrict you that kept you aware of what the situation outside of the headset was really like.

One thing we haven't mentioned is how light the equipment felt. While the headset is not quite as ergonomic as Project Morpheus and Oculus Rift (consumer model) are at this point, the SteamVR controllers were shockingly light. A necessity for longer play sessions of course, but it truly felt like we were holding empty plastic shells. Surely there's something inside, but it didn't feel like it.

HTC Vive: Stepping onto the holodeckHTC Vive: Stepping onto the holodeck
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The real meat and potatoes of the demonstration was "The Secret Shop" - a new demo constructed by Valve that put you in this Dota inspired setting. For the most part the demo allowed us to walk around the shop, look at various things and shrink ourselves down onto shelves and ledges, where we got to interact with the likes of frogs and dragons (now huge compared to ourselves). While the earlier experiences had more of a feeling of tech demos to them, this felt more fleshed out and perhaps a better indication of the vision Valve has for VR. The demo ended with a massive creature tearing the roof of the shop out as it attacked us - we wouldn't have minded it at all if we had been able to shrink ourselves then and there, but alas instead we were taken out of the experience. Scale is something that VR does truly well, and we expect a lot of early games to experiment with letting the player assume both the role of Gulliver and the Liliputians.

Overall, the full Vive experience impressed us. It really does bring the concept of the holodeck to mind - the only thing that worries us is whether there will be many games available that take full advantage of everything Vive offers, especially in the early examples. Hopefully, Valve has a solution to our worries up their sleeve when it launches.

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