HTC Vive Commercial Release – First Impressions

Shortly after receiving our HTC Vive, I rushed to set everything up in a bid to sample the delights of the virtual reality applications available through Steam. For those of you unfamiliar with Steam, it’s an online content distribution service, initially set up for gaming but has since diversified its offerings in a bid to reach out to wider audiences. We’re hoping to improve the student experience by creating engaging visual content for use in our concept classrooms and the promise of virtual reality in this area is quite something.









Unboxing the headset and its accompanying assortment of wires made me wonder how portable a solution the Vive could be. Much of what we do involves showing others what can be done in the classroom and it’s clear that, at the moment, working with a head-mounted display is something which is best kept to dedicated spaces. That is unless you have a dedicated team of technical support staff on hand. As a University with a “Learning and Teaching Innovation Centre“, we’re quite fortunate in that regard.

Initially, the headset wouldn’t connect to my laptop, which only had VGA and display port inputs. The HTC Vive comes just with an HDMI cable (despite also having a mini display port) and so I had to purchase a “mini display to display port” wire separately. Upon arrival, everything worked beautifully and I invited everyone in to have a go with some of the “the lab” demos on Steam along with “theBlu“, a marine life experience wherein the user is surrounded by schools of fish and underwater flora, all of which are interactive and react to being touched by the controllers.

People were ducking down in order to crawl through some of the underwater arches and flinching as a whale got a little bit too close for comfort, before which its giant, reflective eye gave a knowing wink. All of this took place both on the headset and on the laptop display, allowing others to see what the user was experiencing. The emotional bandwidth of these experiences is nothing short of amazing and I say that after having used the Oculus Rift Devkit 2 extensively. The affordance of the Vive is that, as described, it allows you to physically walk around and interact with an environment using your body whereas with the Oculus you are required to use a joypad at the moment. This will no doubt change in the future but, as of writing this, the HTC Vive is where we are likely to be focusing our virtual reality development.

It’s worth mentioning that the laptop we used ran the 3D experiences poorly – around 25 frames per second – (despite being an i7-4290MQ with 32GB ram) due to an under performing graphics chip (Quadro FX). It just goes to show that you can have a machine which is incredibly fast for video and high resolution image editing yet, without a proper game-based GPU, it will not perform well. There are a number of 3D benchmarks you can consult to see if your hardware is up to scratch and I opted to use a laptop if only because it provided for a much simpler setup. I will be bringing out the big guns for future demonstrations.

I’ll be posting more as we continue to experiment with things. At the moment, we’re brainstorming some usage scenarios involving role-play exercises.