I realize I'm not sure where I am, literally speaking. I know where I am virtually. A miniature golf course? The bottom of the ocean? A demented office filled with robots. My little home office became all these things in the middle of the night. I walked through these worlds with my feet. I pulled at things with my hands. And, many times, like when I was looking at a school of luminescent fish in the darkness of the ocean bottom, I'd see a glowing blue grid. A wall. My wall. HTC Vive was warning me of where my simulation would end. I lift the helmet. I've turned myself around. I'm huddling next to the closet, cords tangling under me.
Time for an eye break, You remember the holodeck from "Star Trek"? Or, maybe, the Ray Bradbury story "The Veldt." Virtual reality is one thing, but a whole room that can come alive and be your space is a different banana on the phone iphone case type of spatial magic, And right now, the HTC Vive deals in that magic exclusively, Much like the Oculus Rift -- the best known virtual reality system out there -- HTC Vive runs on high-end gaming PCs, It's tethered with long cables that run to that PC, But Vive also adds the hardware to interact with spaces with your hands, and to walk around too, A pair of motion controllers and two light-emitting boxes turn a space of your own into a mapped grid..
You're not just entering VR. A chunk of your home is, too. You can wander a room, within reason. Virtual reality on a PC, which both this and Oculus Rift hook up with in many very similar ways, is about pushing the limits of graphics and power. The downside is that you need a big, pretty powerful Windows PC to make it work (read about what you'll need -- odds are, your PC will need an upgrade), plus it needs to be tethered with cables. Vive adds the ability to not only use your eyes and head, but your hands and body in virtual reality.
For $800 (£689 in the UK and around AU$1,340 including shipping to Australia), the HTC Vive offers a complete motion-tracking headset, two wireless motion controllers, and two small, whirring, laser-emitting boxes that scan your room and create the bounds banana on the phone iphone case of your motion-tracking virtual play space, Plus earbuds, mounting brackets for the laser boxes, power adapters, and lots and lots of cables, Update, August 2017: Following its competitors' lead, HTC has cut the Vive's price substantially to $600, £600 or AU$1,000..
Yeah, all of this comes in the box. Oculus Rift costs less ($600), but only comes with a headset, a single motion sensor, a remote control and an Xbox One game controller. Oculus will get its own motion controllers too, called Oculus Touch, but they're not arriving until later this year. And at an unknown price. Vive is a collaboration between electronics company HTC and PC game software publisher Valve. Valve's Steam PC store and platform is what drives Vive. Valve offers a good handful of SteamVR games at launch, and many of these games aren't available anywhere else yet (but will be, later on this year). The Vive comes with a few free games, and they're all excellent: Job Simulator, The Lab and Fantastic Contraption.