Gadgetory

I have seen the future of virtual reality again I'm Scott Stein here in Barcelona and the HTC 5 developer edition when we heard about it it's a partnership with valve that's promising to bring virtual reality gaming by the holidays we knew that and now I've demoed it and believe me it's awesome i've seen oculus rift I've seen project Morpheus and this might be the best of all of them which is a shocker so what makes the HTC vive so cool and so much different than other stuff will oculus rift its latest version allows you to wander around within a little square the HTC vive allows you to wander through an entire room as long as this 5 meter tether cable to your PC allows you to go this is a prototype version the developer edition may be like this we don't know what the consumer version will be like exactly probably wired and as you move around it has sensors there are little laser beam boxes that sit on each corner of the room and shoot an array of lights that work with sensors on the helmet that tell you where you are in space now the war version for consumers will have I are instead of lasers but it really worked and I was able to tell when I got close to a wall even though I was blinded from it a ghost wall appeared in my virtual experience that matched it and let me know that I was about to run into it but there are two other awesome things about HTC vive the controller is one it's like valves steam controller split in two you've got two with triggers here and you've got capacitive disks here that you can click on so you can actually move around almost like a trackpad or a mouse and when you're using the game those appear in the game and allow you they become different tools so I did a painting tool where I can move my thumb over this and suddenly the tools appeared and I was a look dip my paintbrush in and suddenly paint with light all around the room and I felt like I was painting like this and dancing around it was ridiculous this is not capture it but that's pretty amazing because you can suddenly use tools in space also there's the valve steam store there's going to be an actual store for games now oculus only just begun getting into that and you can expect a lot of games a lot of partnerships HBO Lions Gate Valve of course Google what did I see in that world well I saw the blue which was an aquarium simulation where I was standing on a sunken pirate ship walking right up to the edge and looking at a giant blue whale overhead that was gigantic and finally what did it wrap up with a little teaser from aperture science I've seen a lot of VR and I was still pretty amazed by this it's maybe the very first consumer-ready pc gaming experience when it comes out by the holidays or maybe there'll be other surprises but this really raises the bar and shows there are a lot more players in VR than oculus I'm Scott Stein here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and you haven't seen the things I've seen but you would want to