SEATTLE — I played the HTC Vive virtual reality headset with a full set of near-finished games at an event held by Valve, the creator of the Steam VR system that the gear uses. And the verdict is that it’s a good simulator of an immersive experience, and it can provide you with a good way to interact with the VR worlds that you visit.
HTC plans to release the PC-based Vive sometime in April, but it hasn’t disclosed its final price or how much the games cost. Valve said the hardware wasn’t final yet, so consider this more of a preview than a final review of the system, which will come later. But this hands-on experience in Seattle was a treat, as Valve and HTC have been much quieter about showing off what the Vive can do than rivals Oculus VR’s Rift (coming in March) or the mobile-based Samsung Gear VR, which launched in November. I’ll have individual descriptions of each game coming in later posts.
Overall impressions
I played a dozen games with the Vive yesterday. A number of them are expected to debut with the headset’s launch, but a few of them aren’t coming out until later in the year. The system has come a long way since I saw it in May, in terms of playable content that works seamlessly.
I enjoyed some of them, and all of them showed that developers had put a lot of work aimed at delivering a console game-like experience. You’ll find some of them appearing on the Oculus Rift headset, a rival VR headset from Facebook’s Oculus VR division that will hit the market on March 28.
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“HTC and Valve have finally shown us a lot of serious content that can be considered full games and that cover a pretty broad spectrum of gameplay,” said Anshel Sag, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “The Vive likely has even more and better content coming down the road. So far what we’ve seen is just some of the most mature content. Most of the titles we saw were launch titles and the pricing of roughly $30 for most seems pretty reasonable for indie game titles on Steam.”
Above: Dean Takahashi plays with the HTC Vive VR headset.
Getting seasick?
One of them made me seasick. The spaceship sim Elite: Dangerous has a mode where you could drive a rover-like vehicle over a rocky planet. It was bouncing around, and I was shooting at some “skimmer” vehicles and driving in circles as I was chasing them. It was too much motion, and it showed that even with a high-end PC-based system such as the Vive, you can still get motion sickness.
But that was the only game that tried to do that much motion with six degrees of freedom, and it was the only one of the 12 that made me woozy. The space combat part of Elite Dangerous, which resembles the interstellar flight sim action of Eve: Valkyrie (a game Oculus uses to show off its Rift — and is part of the headset’s commercial package), didn’t make me sick.
Above: Elite Dangerous lets you fight and explore on the ground in a rover.
My wooziness runs counter to what I thought about the Vive last May, when Valve representative said they had designed the system to reduce seasickness as much as possible. For the most part, the imagery of the simulated world keeps up with the movements you make. The precision of the system — designed by Valve and implemented by HTC — is purposely designed to minimize motion sickness, Valve game programmer Jeep Barnett told me last year.
Nevertheless, the quality looks so good in the room-scale, 360-degree view experience that it remains the technology to beat in virtual reality. The only thing missing is force feedback in the controls, which could theoretically make you feel the things that you touch — or hit you — in VR.
The top Vive experiences
Some of the other games were just pure fun. Google’s Tilt Brush, which I saw a year ago, has come a long way as a virtual painting experience where you can be inside the 3D painting that you are creating. While Oculus VR created a sculpting app dubbed Medium, Tilt Brush is all about painting with your hands. You can use the hand controls to select different kinds of brushes. You can even paint with colorful bubbles. It was a wondrous experience, and something that you can do only inside an immersive, 360-degree virtual reality experience.
Above: Google’s Tilt Brush VR app lets artists paint in 3D.
Another awesome game was Final Approach, a throwback to the days when you played around with toys in a room and imagined flying airplanes and helicopters in difficult situations. One of the first things you notice is that it plunks right in the middle of an imaginary island with two airfields. Planes fly around you in the sky. You use your finger to point at one of the planes and then trace a path with your finger for where it should fly. You can take it down on a circling path to make a perfect landing through a series of circles onto a runway. You can also guide a helicopter through a city and drop a load of material on a skyscraper under construction. Or you can stand in the middle of the battle of Midway and command your aircraft to land on aircraft carriers or avoid enemy fighters.
The cool part of this experience is that it makes you feel like you are immersed inside a world of toys or miniatures. I can imagine real-time strategy games where you can point to a menu and deploy groups of soldiers to fight for you on a battlefield that is right before your eyes.
More game impressions
The other games were Audioshield, a music experience where you block balls coming at you from all directions using shields that you hold in your hand controls. I did this to a Beastie Boys song, and I was exhausted at the end of the 3-minute tune because I had to keep holding the shield in different directions. Space Pirate Trainer was a similar experience, except I was holding a shield in one hand and a gun in the other, firing back at the floating objects shooting at me.
Above: Audioshield