- The Oculus Touch controllers will require placement of two cameras (when they come out), similar to the two Vive base-stations. You're currently comparing the setup of a seated Oculus experience to a Room-Scale Vive experience, it's like comparing setting up a Chromebook vs a Desktop computer. Yea, the desktop takes more setup, but it's more powerful.
- There's 1 3-in-1 cable on the Vive that has HDMI, USB, and power, and then there's a really short one that connects to earphones/headphones. Are you sure you are talking about the consumer version?
- If you lose tracking often, you probably need to alter your setup, or make sure you don't have a large reflective floor or mirror in your tracking space. The Vive uses lasers for motion tracking that have sometimes been interfered with due to high reflectance. I've personally never had tracking issues I couldn't resolve by repositioning.
You also don't need to put them at weird angles, mine are on either side of the room, basically 1 foot above my head facing each other. They have a rather wide 120 degree field of view.
- You can adjust the focus distance on the Vive, might want to check that if you are having blurriness. That said, the resolution on both devices is identical, but they are both not super-high as they are the first consumer devices of this generation, so it won't be picture perfect. That said, it doesn't generally hurt the immersion if the game/experience is well designed.
That's just some information / my experiences, the Oculus is a great device, I just personally think the Vive really leap-frogged them in this first round.
The odd angle I am refering to is having the sensors above the player. I used a bookshelf on one side but had to buy a tripod on the other side.
On the cable, the problem is that even when seated, you end up turning on yourself, and then you don't have one but many cables to manage that you cannot see. It almost requires some assistant.
On blury edges, it doesn't feel like a resolution problem, rather an optical problem. Perhaps my headset wasn't adjusted properly but I couldn't find a way to improve it.
Blurry edges depend a lot on where the headset is sitting on your head, and playing with the straps can really improve the experience (even the feeling like it's heavy). Mine is fairly tight on the sides and then long on the top strap, pulling everything back a lot further than it feels like you are supposed to.
Anyway, not trying to criticize your preference, but hoping your Vive experience can get a bit better.
I use command strips on the walls for my base stations in my bedroom, so no tripods take up any space and no damage to the walls =)
The blurry edges could be a focus thing, could also just be how it is, I've personally experienced a better FOV on the Vive than the Oculus, but I could be mis-remembering.
Blurriness can eventually be helped a bit by supersampling (already possible, just need a powerful system to handle it), and some work being done on things like foveated rendering [1] helping to create higher-res displays.
Are you using roomscale? It wasn't clear from your comparison. It's the biggest difference that matters between Vive and Oculus. Roomscale is fundamentally a superior experience. Until Oculus has a generally available implementation of it, Vive is at a different level above Oculus.
I think 100,000 early adopters given the current very high price suggests going mainstream isn't much of a problem.
In particular, the Vive is really only harder to set up because it's the full deal right out of the box. The Rift is just the headset, an Xbox controller, and a single webcam that you can place on your desk. Out of the box, the Rift is wholly incapable of room-scale VR. Of course, that will change with Touch, but at that point it won't be any easier to set up.
I will agree with you that the Rift's picture quality is significantly better. The Vive suffers from severe chromatic aberration towards the edges. You do get used to it very quickly because of how engaging the experiences are, but when I switch between the headsets it's the very first thing I notice.
I think the problem of comfort is a complex one. The Rift is definitely lighter and it has a better weight distribution. And yet somehow the Vive is really not uncomfortable at all for me. It has a much softer face cushion for one thing. Overall I'd say it's a bit of a wash in this department. I slightly prefer the Rift, but not as much as I thought I would.
My main experience demoing the dk2 around was that the first thing everyone did was try raising their hands in front of their face, and that motion sickness hit about 30% of people. The Vive fixes both of those problems, and they're first to market.
Still, facebook has deep pockets, and from everything I've heard their headset is better and their controllers are better. I can't wait to give them a try.
The next big thing that I want in VR is multiplayer.
Battledome, Rec Room, Hover Junkers
There's a bunch more, but these are the most polished, in my opinion. Battledome/Rec Room really shine because you can get right next to a person, wave at them, talk to them (built in mic on the Vive headset). It's super immersive and cool to be literally right next to a person that is maybe in another country.
It still seems like early days for multiplayer. There's no way to see other people's facial expressions, and the avatars are pretty basic. There's also no support for having a local multiplayer experience. Hololens is doing some interesting things, allowing multiple headsets to see the same holograms, but their hardware is still super limited. The void is also doing interesting things.
I guess I should have said that I want better multiplayer.
The Void's Ghostbusters game looks amazing. They are using custom hardware and a more expensive tracking technique, but it is an awesome example of a "VR-Arcade" sort of business.
Disclosure: A friend of mine worked on it.
I agree with you that the Oculus is more comfortable most of the time, unless you have glasses. The Vive has enough space to accommodate glasses, but I could not get the Rift on comfortably, though they fit fine in my older DK2.
I didn't like the light gap around the nose of the Oculus but I would assume it's easy enough to "plug up."
Personally haven't tried Oculus, but the Vive does get really heavy on the face after 30 minutes or so.
- easier to set up, the Vive requires these little captors placed at odd angles, that need to be powered and that make noise when powered
- the oculus is lighter. I find the weight of the headset to be a major factor for not playing long periods, more than motion sickness, particularly given that some games require some weird viewing angles
- the headset has less cables. I have the feeling of wearing an octopus with the vive
- I regularly lose tracking on the vive for short moments (grey screens) even though the captors are in direct line of sight and less than 3m away
- I have the feeling the vive is a lot blurier when looking at the sides of the screen. Not something one does when a zombie is trying to kill you, but certainly something one does when navigating menus
The only downsides of the oculus are:
- vertical green line between the two eyes, very visible in a dark environment
- the oculus pauses the game when I take off the headset. Except that I do that when a game is holding me hostage with some interminable, unskippable story telling instead of letting me play VR (too frequent!)