HTC and Valve just showed the Vive at MWC, and it is a fundamentally different vision of VR than what Oculus is building. The Vive is built around room-scale tracking: two base stations called Lighthouse track the headset and a pair of motion controllers across your entire room. You stand up, walk around, and physically move through virtual space. This is not a sit-down, gamepad experience.
Room-scale changes everything
Valve’s SteamVR platform runs underneath, and the chaperone system draws a grid when you approach a wall so you do not smash into your furniture. It sounds like a small detail and it is not. Being able to duck, lean, and walk transforms VR from a window you look through into a place you actually exist inside. The Rift has not shipped yet, but the Vive is the thing that makes me feel like the hardware has finally caught up to what VR always promised.
The trend for the year ahead
The consumer VR race is now a two-horse affair: Oculus and SteamVR, with PlayStation VR coming up behind. Expect room-scale to become the benchmark. Any platform that cannot do it is going to feel like a step backward once people experience what physical tracking actually does to presence.
Room-scale is the thing that makes VR real to me. Sitting with a gamepad and a headset is impressive in a technical sense. Standing up and walking through a space is transformative. The Vive just set the bar, and it is higher than I expected it to be this early.
Part of Two Decades of XR, my running diary of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.