Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech



















SEATTLE, Washington—Valve and HTC took the wraps off of their latest, near-final version of the Vive virtual reality system at this month's CES, but we barely got a chance to play with the refreshed headset. That changed on Wednesday thanks to an event hosted in Valve's hometown of Seattle, where the company offered Ars 12 lengthy demos of upcoming games and apps.

Our detailed impressions of those dozen demos are forthcoming, but in the meantime, we have good news. The pre-release Vive Pre hardware may not be phenomenally better than the original Vive dev kit, but every change has made an already-impressive VR system feel that much more complete, comfortable, and worth salivating over.

Like the original HTC Vive dev kit, the Vive Pre asks users to wear a VR headset whilst walking around a pre-defined, real-life space and holding motion-tracked wands in each hand. These wands' main buttons are still a gun-like trigger and a thumb-accessible, clickable trackpad; in addition, the handle has a button on each side of the controller's grip, and those are now positioned for easier hand access. New menu buttons have been placed above and below the trackpad, as well.

The controller's new rounded design looks more attractive than the original version's clunky, "polygonal ice cream cone" style—without losing any apparent trackability, from our anecdotal experience, at least. Like before, they're not noticeably heavy or cumbersome, and they're tracked very well in virtual space.

Glad to have a “chaperone”

As for the headset, its biggest change is a new front-facing camera, meaning that Vivers (Vivaloons? Vivesters?) can now peek at their real-life surroundings without having to take the headset off. The default way to do this is to double-tap a controller's lower menu button. This turns on a fuzzy, blue-monochrome "chaperone" view over whatever game or app you're using, as if the walls and people around you were rendered as heatmaps in a night-vision camera.

For the uninitiated, the HTC Vive is designed to let users walk around real-life space while wearing the headset, based on wherever you place the system's twin tracking stations, and it used to represent this in virtual space via blurry blue boundaries that'd occasionally appear. The webcam view now replaces this—and in much more compelling and comfortable fashion—as the chaperone mode will fade into your game view when you're about to bump into your tracking stations' limits, showing blurry, perfectly aligned versions of walls and other real-life elements in your VR room.

Additionally, should a person—or more importantly for many potential users, an excited pet—wander into your tracked space, the chaperone view will sometimes automatically pop up, showing exactly where your best friend (human, dog, parakeet, etc.) is standing relative to you. We're particularly interested in testing how well this feature works in our own homes, since we weren't really sure how its sensitivity is currently calibrated. (Sadly, Valve didn't invite any Chihuahuas or terriers into Wednesday's demos.)

None of the event's demos used the webcam to add real-life content to the experience, and based on the blurriness of what we saw, we assume those webcams were added more for safety's sake than for adding serious immersion to upcoming games.







Sam Machkovech



The other major difference we noticed was the headset's harness, which isn't nearly as sleek as the one on the retail Oculus Rift headset. On the one hand, that's because it currently uses a cheap-feeling pair of velcro straps for the sake of tightening to a user's face (which we hope will be improved in time for the retail edition). On the other, that's because the harness now doubles as a holder for the Vive's very, very bulky series of cords, which still dangle from behind your head. This cord-tie solution is much improved over the original dev kit, in terms of keeping those cords stable and comfortable, but it's still possible to get in a bad position and trip, based on how you walk around in real space whilst navigating a virtual world.

Heavy, both in hardware and in emotional impact

Additionally, this combination of bulky cords—which the system requires as opposed to wireless communications, due to bandwidth needs—and a slightly heavier headset than the Oculus means that the system may feel uncomfortable for some users. We say this with only our anecdotal experience of various trade shows and Wednesday's event. While we didn't feel discomfort during our own demo-event use, we are very interested in investigating how a full day's use might feel. Also, we couldn't really feel a weight difference between the Pre and the original dev kit.

Screen quality and tracking quality continue to remain impressive, though that's only based on anecdotal experience of a combined three hours of Vive Pre demos. The screen quality doesn't appear to have any particular improvements, but the refresh rate, brightness, and pixel density were already solid on the original dev kit. Tracking felt a lot more consistent—which is the most reassuring takeaway from our experience, since the Vive lives and dies by its ability to track movements across a giant real-life room.

Of course, what good's an improved piece of VR hardware with nothing cool to play on it? We'd already been pretty stoked on the HTC Vive after jaw-dropping demos at events last year, but our dozen-strong demo session has only gotten us more excited about what SteamVR's flagship device will soon enable. Stay tuned for our full, forthcoming report on the demos we fell for during Wednesday's SteamVR Developer Showcase.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech