Gadgetory

everyone i am steve from gamers nexus dotnet and i'm joined by patrick stone our hardware editor and we're talking about HTC's vibe which is also known as valves VR solution and it is a product made by HTC HTC manufactured design and valve has contributed their own input and demands including latency demands and software support and they've also assisted in the development of the White House which is the accompanying laser or I or is it ir or laser now it's it is IR laser okay so it shoots down beams there you go to corners of the room and it basically scans the room checks for presence of objects walls and the user and then in the headset which is all virtual reality so you're not actually seeing the room it draws at least when I used it draws up walls when you approach the real walls to let you know that you should probably stop going that way yeah it's called their chaperone system that's the name they've given it and it just you know helps you not to run into walls right which is important so we saw at GDC and we were not allowed to film at that time but we've got some film this time and the experience is a little different so I tried it at GDC Patrick try to hear yep and had a couple different games the basic specs of the HTC vive are it's got a 20 160 x 1200 mm display resolution and that's using two displays at what was it 1080 x 1200 yeah right it's a 1080 x 1200 resolution for the two separate displays one for each I their lenses in there just like oculus and all the other VR solutions have there in technology and it's got a couple of different inputs and outputs so you've got three plugs that matter USB 3 for the data transmission to and from the pc HDMI for audio video yep and then the third was how are you got a half hour and then there is an audio jack as well yeah so that's accompanied by two controllers which I don't know a whole lot about because chains I think since I saw them okay so what's what's up with the controller's right now what are they so with the controllers they're basically I guess you'd call them want more than anything and they have photodiodes on them to interact with the base stations the house space stations and in addition to that they actually communicate with the pc software and they do that through little radio frequency wireless transmitters and those radio frequency wireless transmitters are actually connected to radio frequency wireless transmitters that are plugged in currently two USB dongles that plug-in on the headset the engineer that we were working with a guy named Levi was saying yeah it's probably not going to be that way in the final product you won't have a little USB dongles hanging from your head but that's how it's working and so it gives the general idea of how the communication system works right and the pipeline is basically it shifts the signal from the system from the pc that goes down your audio video USB all that that we just discussed and then it's eventually output to the displays and at that point you've got obviously latency concerns which is a big issue that oculus has had to tackle over the last few years so the latency did they ever give us a number on with the no they didn't give us a number but just from user experience I mean it was it was good stuff really was it's fairly responsive when I tried at GDC I felt like for traditional gaming purposes like an FPS for example you probably would not want to use this yeah because it didn't seem like it was accurate enough and not not quite that responsive right but for new experiences like there was a painting program when we go in there and he can paint stuff in three dimensions really cool what were what was the you had a plain one or something yeah so I got to play a game where basically you had airplanes that were flying around you had to literally walk through the land and grab the airplanes and when you grab the airplanes you then directed them how to land and you had a couple of features like that where the interaction was was me grabbing something and then slowly got to get in somewhere so it wasn't like super rapid movement and I guess even just open space kind of stuff where there was just one sim where it was just kind of getting you familiar with the space and you were underwater and I think you got to do this one of the whale yeah a whale and it's actually from what i remember it gets up pretty close to you yes i'm like a sunken chippers yeah yes I was like yeah like a sunken ship you can go up to the railing which in my demo was where around where the wall was and you can't really go past that physically anyway and that the death was very good very good there's multiple layers of depth and you can definitely see the whale approaching her but but again no like super fast reaction needed so this is the kind of thing we're seeing right now so that there probably are some latency things are still there still working out but to to that that regard again I didn't feel like as I was moving around and interacting with the controllers that it was like click wait for something to happen and then move it was pretty much click happen but if you're playing the first person shooter where split seconds of shooting counts then I could see a problem with that and what was the the dota demo is probably relevant yeah people like dota so you guys might be promoted the shopkeeper right and so they actually got you to go into the shopkeepers place and you got to interact with a lot of objects there and my personal favorite there was a little dragon sitting in the corner and he had like a fish in his mouth and he would just kind of hop around and you could just poke at him he would hop around and back up but the man talked about wanting to go into a game and like be fully immersed in a game that was the experience that was going on here so pretty impressive from from my point of view at this later stage of development I think the technology is very impressive the use cases and implementations are going to be a challenge I talked about this in the first article where you basically require either an empty room or a large space you can dedicate to this yeah it's not something everyone can have if you're like cramped in an apartment already or something good pulling because you do need space for the White House is to be in the corners of the room and to not trip over stuff not at all because this is a fully you see nothing of the outside yep so technologically I I know that the the refresh rate is 90 hurts yep on the two screens and you spoke to leave I was it yeah so you heard a lot more about the tech than I did what's what stuff that people should know um so the the text pretty cool in that one of the things they did that allows them to push these high-resolution images at high refresh rates is that you know that they are using HDMI and that allows the data to come across quickly so there is this the the idea that you're walking around with a cord tagged onto the back of your head and I think it's going to stay that way in the early development the levi and us also talked about the possibility of wireless in the future and he said don't count on it but don't count it out either so looking at some of the other parts so we've already talked about the hdmi we've already talked about the power we already talked about the USB and we've talked about controllers and how the controllers are linked wirelessly via USB dongles but we haven't gone into a lot of detail is the sound and we have to talked about a pretty cool concept currently what they want to do with sound is they want to have the hdmi deliver the audio to the headset and then on the headset as a 3.5 millimeter stereo jack you plug it in about right there and then you can use a nice set of you know no headphones yeah real headphones right some some gaming headphones and you put them on and then again you're immersed but another idea would be to use a fully configured surround sound system and the advantage of doing something like that would be that you could still hear outside real world sounds like so if somebody was in need of your help and you need to quit playing a game you can actually hear that whereas with headphones on you may not hear that is a legitimate use case concerning easily yeah so we've talked about how the information is over to the system Houston delivers it to you but how does this know where you are right so we talked about not running into walls yeah systems got to know where the wall farm so this was where the lighthouse base stations come in the lighthouse base stations are infrared laser true I guess you could call them transmitters and they kind of shoot a beam pattern down the floor and it goes left and right on a rotor and it goes up and down the rotor and so you've got one from one corner and then one from the opposing corner and the reason they did that he explained this to me was that let's say you you turn around and then all of the photodiodes that are on the headset and that are on the controllers if you turn around let's say your backs your back spacing me and you got one of your lighthouse pay stations shooting this way they can't seem to the photodiodes so that's why the other ones it's employed yeah you got it and so it it uses these base stations in the way Levi expand it was like a GPS like approach the base stations don't talk to the system and in any way all they do is they just project lasers and so like in gps we don't ever talk to the satellites but the satellites do send signals down and so it's a it's a system that allows the headset to keep up with where it is based on these lasers right so it you know with these lighthouse base stations one of the cool things is that we were told that if you wanted to make a bigger room or a hallway you could do that you could just add lighthouse way stations and then you can theoretically just keep piling them out so it's like tile tile tile tile and you just keep getting bigger well the problem with that the limitations that we have right now is you'd have to have like a really long hdmi cord really long power cord a really long USB cord and some of you guys might say not only goes so far yeah you get signal degradation exactly right and then then some people were like whoa let's just do it all wirelessly and the problems wireless is bandwidth right now we currently don't have the bandwidth to send a really nice high definition video signal over wireless so some people have been like hey well let's just strap a PC to our back then yeah well then you got battery issues too so but hey there's engineers people like fun stuff maybe it'll get developed in here right so speaking out development the original target I was told as 2015 yeah it sounds like that's only an initial run now and then the rest is 2016 yep that's the middle so that's let's compete with oculus and some other solutions but that is what the target date looks like I was not told the price for you know didn't get any prices yet so no price yet it's still kind of nebulous there but we will keep everyone updated via the website gamers Nexus net and of course check back on the YouTube channel and if you like this kind of content if you like the technical detail then do check out our patreon page which is in the post roll video we linked there so that that's all for the HTC vive hit the length of description below for the full article although other technical stuff we didn't get into here and we will see you all next time