Gadgetory

hey I'm addy with the verge I'm here with the HTC vive which is built with valve the thing that's actually amazing about it is how much you can move around with it and how interactive it is just in terms of being a VR headset it's a lot like the oculus rift you put it on the field of view is roughly the same but instead of being tracked by an external camera you have these base stations that you put in the corner of your rooms and they essentially shine lasers across the rooms these lasers pick up the sensors that are all over the front of this headset and all over these controllers so it can give you a really accurate feel of where you actually are they contract more than one headset at once so you can have multiple people in a room and they can meet up in VR space you're able to move within what feels like maybe a few square feet and that's actually enough for you to walk around and a lot of really small VR environments so we've tried demos where you can walk around the front of a ship or you can walk around on a little wooden platform and look at things there's an amazing demo called tilt brush where you're able to paint you're just in a canvas and you'll take these controllers and use them as paint brushes the controllers share a lot with Valve's new steam controller there's a trackpad on each one of them and you can use it as a sort of analog stick or you can touch things with it it's a little bit weird still they're clearly still prototypes they look very strange right now the controllers have wires and the headset has a lot of wires and you have to wear a belt to wear the whole thing but eventually the controllers themselves are going to be wireless and the headsets going to just have one apparently very long wire that you'd connect to your computer we don't really know how this would work outside an extremely controlled environment but just as a demo it's incredibly exciting