Our first test of HTC’s virtual reality product powered by Valve used a Geforce GTX 980 Ti while second was running AMD’s Fury X.
The first demo was organized by Nvidia’s director of gaming labs Sean Cleveland. We had a chance to walk around and see a few demos. The first demo we saw was Everest were you end up quite engaged in a lot of snow, if you like being engaged in snow this was ideal.
The glasses don’t give you a fatigue but we did need the cable guy in our demo who assisted Joe Vivoli the demo master.
You get chills when you get on the edge of the ridge. You use controllers to climb to the next peak to use some special features such as a magnifying glass. The controllers work well but the battery doesn’t last that long. This is still a prototype and not a shipping product so there will be a few problems that will be ironed out before launch.
The second demo we tried was a whale demo. In this demo you get to walk around a sunken ship. The highlight is when a whale swims past and you can really feel that it is huge.
The third demo we tried was the cooking demo. In this you get to prepare different recipes and test controllers by opening fridge doors, grabbing things and cooking. It was fun to crack an egg and we can imagine that someone might come with a game for the Vive as it was fun to virtually cook. You can have a better experience doing the actual thing, but some things that make little sense such as Nintendo Wii fitness were quite successful.
The second set of demos included the just released Arizona sunshine demo. You use controllers are handguns to shoot zombies in a Half-life looking rocky desert environment. The demo is fun and shows you how HTC Vive will work in an actual game. Shooting zombies is definitely something that many people will love to do. This demo ran Fury X. There was no noticeable difference between
AMD and Nvidia hardware but we are sure that one might end up faster than the other.
In the John Wick VR demo you walk around, bribe a hotel attendant, duck and try to avoid being shoot by sniper. It was fun to see Ansal Sag from Moore insight technology crawling around the floor without alcohol involved.
We see two problems with HTC Vive. You need a lot of space and quite large obstacle free environment. The glasses cannot detect other people, cats, chairs, price-less Ming vases so we can imagine that there will be quite a few injuries and objects being broken.
Vertigo and fatigue remains a concern when you wear it for a while. It is warm under glasses and headphones and it might be easy to trip over cables. We think that this technology has future. The retail version of Oculus will be more competitive but both VR glasses are in its infancy.
