Gadgetory

viii are still has a lot of barriers to overcome cost and both the headset itself and the PC required to run it our factors here the fact that you look like a complete doof while your flouncing about in the middle of your living room is another one and for that matter here we are in the VR space here at Linus Media Group you need a fair bit of space in order to even use it but I think more people could overlook these restrictions if it wasn't for the clunky headsets and the bulky surprisingly heavy easy to tangle and movement restricting tethers that tie them to their PC well as most of you know I'm not an engineer so there's nothing I can really do about the headset itself but after a particularly vigorous round of hollow point the other day I was inspired to see if I could do something about the cable and once again our friends at Corning have come through so today I will be trying at least trying anyway to replace the entire bulky tether with this durable thin and light optical cable cooller masters master case maker five features they're freeform modular system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in the video description so first things first I got to gather up all the supplies I need for what I'm calling project light VR cable get it because it's optical and it's not as heavy so it starts with that Corning optical cable that I mentioned before next we're going to need a gaming computer with support for Thunderbolt so while I know the g7 51 from Asus with its 980m graphics card is not technically VR ready this is a proof-of-concept not my daily driver rig so this will do just nicely however because the HTC vive and the oculus rift for that matter do not have thunderbolt inputs we're actually going to need to split out our Thunderbolt cable into all the necessary connectors on the other end so for that I'll be using the called--it ts2 or really I could use pretty much any Thunderbolt dock but what this baby is going to do is give us 2 USB 3 SuperSpeed ports HDMI and audio exactly what we need also I guess there's another USB port there where is my power adapter for this thing nothing's ever simple it's always a journey to gain Mount Doom when we want to make a video let's find a 5 amp 12 volt DC part I thought the power adapter might be here where I used to have that thing set up running to the server room it's not but I did discover that I already had one of these optical cables so Corning sent me an extra when I guess forgot to meet that what 5 volt 4 amp see I'm pretty sure it's like straight-up non-compliant to not have the voltage of an input listed okay I found this k-tec 12 volt 3 amp thing that fits which I'm hoping is enough because this would be over SPECT to allow for a bunch of devices to be plugged into all the USB ports and everything but speaking of power if we're not going to power the vive through the original tether one of those wires is up is a power cord and we're not going to power it through the Thunderbolt cable which were not because optical cables do not carry power we're going to have to do something which leads us to the last ingredients of our setup a small backpack this was the smallest one we had lying around the office and I'm not buying a backpack for this and for some reason I thought I needed to so two battery banks one of which actually has an AC power outlet okay so I lied that wasn't everything we needed but I found the things we need a short USB 3 a 2 a cable a short HDMI cable and this is fun I remembered what the second power bank is for so that one's to hopefully go DC to DC to power the vibe itself because it's got a 12-volt something amps we're not quite sure max power input however both of our battery banks are dead so we're going to charge these up for the night and we'll get back at this tomorrow so we're back now when I originally conceived this project I actually thought I was gonna have to cut off the tether and then resolder all the individual wires and like figure out which ones were carrying which signals and whatever and all that but you know silly me I had no idea that the HTC vive I mean you can see why it took me a little while to sort this out the HTC vive actually just has all the inputs as plugs up at the top there we go just like that so two USBs one of which I think has functionality TBD HDMI power and three-and-a-half millimeter so theoretically it's as simple as going from here oh wow okay theoretically we've already hit one stumbling block this doesn't physically fit so theoretically it's as simple as going from here into our Thunderbolt hub wow that is not a very long cable so we've got another challenge as well between all the different adapters that come with our ravpower extreme series power bank only one of them is even kind of close to fitting so we would either have to cut off and REE splice a compatible adapter or we'll have to rely on using the AC outlet one and the power squid or a power brick in order to power both the vive as well as the Cal digit box meaning that our battery life will be somewhat more limited three and a half millimeter audio cable should fit though at least a right angle connector nope even plugging my headphones in directly isn't going to work okay so it's back to the drawing board somewhat here hopefully this is one of those things where it gets messy ER before it gets better let's go see if we can find a low profile HDMI cable oh never cut towards your fingers well I'll give monoprice this their HDMI cables are tough obviously I tried to find a lower profile connector one first but failing that I well took the one we had and threw it in the vise about in minutes of hacking away at it later and it's uglier but it fits Wow that is a tight fit you might be back in action here it was at that point that I realized we didn't have thunderbolt drivers be updated Nvidia drivers or the software for the HTC vive installed so we took a short break while I got all the software up to date so we have a small problem if I'm plugged into the HDMI connection on the Cal digit box for getting me a composite or not available error in steamvr but if I plug directly into the HDMI out on the computer we're good now there is still hope it's possible that we can use the Thunderbolt daisy-chain port here to run HDMI / DisplayPort into either directly into the headset or into the splitter box that's included with the vibe but I'm really not sure if that's going to work so stay tuned so we're going to try this again going from Thunderbolt to DVI to HDMI ok I'll try again so just as a troubleshooting step I'm going to go back to the HDMI output right off the computer and into this box so let's make sure that it works if we do that so I've reached a very challenging point in the troubleshooting I have just tried to connect it the vanilla recommended way with the normal tether and running through the connector box and it's still not working but get this when I take a stand-alone HDMI cable and plug that directly into the computer now whatever take my word for it the headset comes up and it starts working so I'm starting to think this might be a combination of issues where the Thunderbolt implementation yeah there see there it is ready where the Thunderbolt implementation of this laptop might use the onboard graphics that is a very very likely situation and my box might be dead but as long as there is any potential for a problem to be solved by simply throwing more hardware at it I'm still in the game so I went home I got a mini DisplayPort to HDMI I knew I had one of these turns out that's where it was I got a different Thunderbolt to dock I got the connector hub from my own vibe and just for good measure I brought my personal rig back to the office because this one I know for sure because there's a physical damn cable going from my GTX Titan X to the Thunderbolt card this one runs off of the dedicated graphics let's go I suddenly remember why oh we moved to aluminum so it's update time the box isn't dead and the vibe is running perfectly off of my machine now let's try going back to thunderbolt no okay wait a minute oh my god I don't have the Thunderbolt see I'm flustered now okay what's this interesting it says ready let's restart in direct mode Wow wouldn't it be amazing if it was that simple I don't see anything though bob was very abrupt yep we didn't know when we were shooting this video it was going to be a two-parter so Texico it is so it's summer where you board planes trains and maybe even taken a car somewhere to leave your worries behind and today's lack of online privacy brings out your inner grizzly bear wow these are new notes they're very funny if that happens then you should try tunnel bear tunnel bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open Internet with tunnel bear turned on your Wi-Fi connection is secured and your online activity is kept private 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