Intro

I was at EGX Rezzed on Thursday. Prior to going, I had already booked in my slot to try out the PlayStation VR headset from Sony. Luckily for me on the day, I managed to finagle a go on the HTC Vive too thanks to the boys and girls over at the nVidia/HTC stand. They asked me to come back later and book a slot, I said I couldn’t come when they asked as I was interviewing Creative Assembly so they asked which outlet I worked for.

Cue a very quickly mumbled “Wccftech” from me at which point lots of jaws dropped and eyebrows got raised. I wasn’t sure beforehand if they’d have heard of us but they all knew. One of the crew even called over some colleagues saying “Hey guys! Get over here, you’ll never believe who just showed up, it’s WCCFTECH IN THE FLESH!”

After much begging me to reveal our sources (“Honestly guys, I don’t work for the hardware section! I think that a lot of it comes as tips from our great reader community though!”), they agreed to give me a slot on the Vive so thanks nVidia! I booked in immediately before my slot on the PS VR so I could do a direct compare.

If you’re interested in a bit more about VR, I got to ask John Carmack (of Doom fame and current Oculus CTO) a few questions about it and how async is important for VR on the red carpet. Check out my interview with him here.

I’ve had a try on several Oculus DK’s since their kickstarter launch, but this was going to be my first experience on the Vive and PS VR. Although I liked the little I’ve experienced of VR, something about it has thus far screamed “KEEP AWAY! FIRST GEN! WAIT FOR IT TO MATURE!”

This is probably for a few reasons including:

1. CONTENT! While chatting with David Braben on the red carpet, his assessment that “we’re one of the only AAA games (Elite Dangerous) that supports VR today” was, although probably a mild exaggeration, not that far from the truth. Other games are coming, but guess how many games I can use my monitor on? Yup, all of them. How about an expensive VR headset? Not so many.
2. Headset fatigue. The few times I’ve tried VR, it’s been great for short bursts of usage. But when I game, I like to sit down for a few hours and get into my game. Headsets aren’t uncomfortable as such. But at the same time, it’s not like you’re decked out on a chaise longue on a private beach in the Maldives y’know? I’m unconvinced that current headsets will be comfortable for the hours on end that I’ll want to use them for.
3. Motion sickness. I’ve spent some time at sea. I don’t turn green the second I step on board a ship but at the same time, I’ve crossed the Bay of Biscay a few times over the years and know that I definitely have some tendencies towards motion sickness.
4. Add onto the above the fact that you just know there are going to be better version 2’s of the PC devices which are lighter, perhaps have less cables, better resolutions with broader fields of view etc and it seems like a no brainer.

On to the headsets!

HTC Vive

First up, the Vive. The nice nVidia lady slips the headset on me and a pair of headphones follows. I wear glasses, they’re not huge ones and a bit of fiddling about later, I’m comfortable. I’m in what looks kind of like the Matrix loading room. It’s a whitish grid based room, nothing really to look at. All of a sudden I see a pair of Vive controllers approaching me and hear a distant voice saying “here, take your controllers!”

Bemused at the fact that I can see some real world objects in VR I put my hands out to where I judge them to be in real life and grab hold (of the controllers!).

They’re instantly comfortable and intuitive. I can see where my thumbs are touching the touchpads from a little dot on the pads. There is a trigger too which the index finger naturally comes to rest on.

Before I know it, there’s some kind of balloon on the end of the controller. Holding down the trigger blows up the balloon. Bringing the other controller up to the balloon allows me to knock it away with a little haptic feedback effect as I tap the balloon. I can select the colour of the balloon on the left thumb touchpad. A few balloons later and I’m sitting there thinking “ok, not bad, but there’s no way I’m paying over £700 for that. £700 buys a lot of real life balloons…”

I’m back at the loading room and the next set is loading. I’m instantly thrust onto the underwater deck of a wreck in WEVR's TheBlu Encounter. Fish are swimming all around me, I look up and can see daylight filtering down from the surface of the water and lots of fish and rays swimming around. I wonder…

I take a look at some of the small fish swimming seemingly close to my face. They look very lifelike. I stick my controller out towards them and they swim to get out of the way. Nice! I start to walk around the deck of the ship a bit, it’s not very big as you’d expect. That’s a function of both the facts that I’m tethered to a PC with cables and in a fixed room which is also not huge. As I approach the edge of the deck, a glowing grid appears to warn me that I’m approaching the end of the holodeck area so I step back.

Pretty cool again. But after a couple of minutes of being awestruck, I’m starting to get bored of scaring fish away, when all of a sudden, I hear a noise. I turn around to look in the direction it came from and nearly have a heart attack as I see a huge whale swimming toward me! It comes to rest right next to the deck of the ship and it’s just a gargantuan thing. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s amazing in detail and scale. The flipper is almost next to me. I’m standing there gobsmacked at the view when all of a sudden it starts to move and I intuitively jump to get out of the way as the “arm” flipper (yeah, I’m no marine biologist!) swooshes through where I was standing seconds before. Then the tail comes swooping down and I brace for impact before remembering I’m in a simulation. Some of the stuff on deck gets whooshed around a bit as the whale swims off but I’m left intact.

There are a few other games, a very dull “you at work” one where you get to eat donuts, drink coffee, throw paper aeroplanes at your boss etc and a 3D paint type program by google called Tilt Brush which is pretty cool, but I’m no artist. Now to the first thing I’d classify as an actual game.

Space Pirate Trainer loads up and what on the face of it is a very simplistic stationary shooter with you standing on a platform while waves of flying robots come and start shooting at you is actually a pretty involving game. The first few waves are easy, but as more robots come, all those years spent tilting your body to the left while playing a videogame and trying to move left all of a sudden have meaning. You can DODGE the incoming fire! Your two controllers are transformed into guns and you unsurprisingly pull the triggers to shoot them at the robots. Very simple premise, but exceedingly enjoyable to play. I have no doubt that in the coming years, people will look back at Space Pirate Trainer with the same sympathetic eyes with which we today view Space Invaders or Pac Man.

It’s a completely uninspiring game on the surface. But given that this is the first game I’ve EVER PLAYED where me moving around didn’t make me feel stupid because I should’ve been moving the controller instead of my body, it’s AWESOME! Kind of like a bowler who after throwing the ball starts leaning his body trying to steer it with sheer will, now that will be a useful skill.

After finally removing the headset, I discovered myself a bit breathless from all the ducking and diving trying to avoid incoming fire. Pretty awesome, although the game graphically was nothing amazing.

None of the experiences I tried on the Vive ever seemed to struggle in terms of a frame rate or keeping up with my movements.

PlayStation VR

The PS VR experience however was a different kettle of fish. One game, one full round. I sat down in the chair as the Sony rep put the top ring around my forehead and showed me the button to press to adjust the distance of the screen from my eyes until in focus.

They explained I was about to play “RIGS Mechanised Combat League”. A kind of mech robot you sit in shooter and football (soccer to our American compatriots) game all in one. The object was seemingly simple. Shoot the opposing teams mechs, when they die, they drop these glowing yellow balls. Collect the balls and then jump through the “goal” to score points. It’s a timed match.

Starting up, the game introduces me to some basic controls and before long I’m running, jumping, double jumping, shooting, ball collecting and goaling.

The game is a bit more complicated than Space Pirate Trainer, but it’s still not a particularly complex game. I run around the arena shooting the enemy mechs (and occasionally accidentally at my own team) and scoring a couple of goals. Then something odd starts to happen.

The motion sickness which was conspicuously absent on the Vive is starting to appear here. Thankfully the whistle blows and thinking my session is over I reach out the controller in the direction I remember the Sony guy being in who informs me “it’s only half time! Keep going!”

So for you dear readers, I struggled through another half, but now I’m paying more attention to the experience than playing the game. Obviously I didn’t have FRAPS or anything else running, this is on a PS4 after all, not PC but there seemed to me to be some noticeable drops in frame rate. I’m not talking Assassin’s Creed Unity levels here but at the same time, noticeable. Aiming also seems slightly unintuitive, being a combination of controller sticks and head movement. The free reign the Vive gave me to move my whole body and point my “guns” is missing here and I wonder if that’s part of the problem too.

I struggle through the second half and am grateful when the final whistle blows. I win the game 7-2 which seemed surprising, I guess my AI teammates helped me out a lot there but all I could think about was that I couldn’t wait to get the headset off.

Wrapping up

So there we have it. Two platforms, two VR headsets, two completely different experiences. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve not had any extensive time on an Oculus but will soon have a DK2 from a friend and will get some time to try it out. It may be that the motion sickness hits me on Oculus too in which case I’d have to look at the Vive if I wanted to go VR this gen, but then again it may not as it may be more about the frame rate being consistent across the experience, at this stage the evidence is inconclusive.

But at the same time, some people aren’t as prone to motion sickness, some people also don’t want to spend the money on a fairly high end PC that’s needed to run a decent VR setup. nVidia said they were running the Vive on a 980 and the experiences I had on it seemed solid, but that’s not a cheap card. Then add the PC around it, along with the Vive itself (being the most expensive of the VR headsets for this gen) and you can see why the market is not expected to be huge for the first gen.

If you’re wanting to try VR and not spend a lot of money, the PlayStation 4 and PS VR are likely to be your best bet for a cheap way to try it out, but even though I may buy a PS4 again when they bring out Gran Turismo for it, I won’t be buying a PS VR. If I get VR, it’ll be for PC, I’ll obviously want to use it with Star Citizen after all!

Prior to these demos, I was entirely convinced I wouldn’t buy into VR this generation for all of the reasons I mentioned at the beginning of the article. Now, I’m not so sure and this is perhaps the greatest testament to the experience I had with the Vive.

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