There are many people who are happily ordering their HTC Vive today. They made a choice based on many factors. Yet here you are unable to decide. In some ways it is an easy decision but if you are thinking about VR you may find yourself lost a bit especially if you have not been able to try one of these products for yourself.

In fairness like it or not a bush war of sorts has been started and the opening shot was fired when Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014. Prior to that Oculus and Valve worked together in a bit of a Kumbaya moment where it was all for the good of virtual reality. It was a good time but a precarious time in that Oculus really didn’t have the money to get a VR headset into the marketplace on their own. The Facebook acquisition lit the match and now we have major companies all wanting a piece of this next great computing platform.

It became a full on war when Valve announced a VR headset in partnership with HTC. They initially promised a somewhat crazy ship date but showed a very capable first development kit. The key weapon they brought to the field was hand tracking via their controllers and room scaled experiences all using a technology called Lighthouse.

Lighthouse essentially is simple in concept and genius in reality. The tracking solution uses small boxes that are placed diagonally in a room (or just one for seated experience in front of you). These boxes emit laser beams that are then picked up by the headset and the controller. The headset and controllers are then responsible for transmitting the location information back to the computer. The great thing is that the lighthouse boxes are not connected directly to the computer they just need line of sight to transmit synchronization information to the corresponding lighthouse box across the room. There is a cable provided if for whatever reason the wireless connection does not work.

The Oculus Rift uses a system they call Constellation. Its approach is very different from that of Lighthouse. Essentially it relies on similar techniques that have been employed for years for motion capture. The headset has built in IRDs that pulse and the camera connected to the PC picks it up and translates what it sees that into tracking information. Oculus currently is not offering a room scale or hand tracking controllers for purchase but they have announced and publicly demonstrated their Oculus Touch hand controllers with a release date for the latter half of 2016. These controllers require a second camera for tracking.

Frankly this is a lot of techno babble to explain what the core difference is from the hardware perspective. However, it is very important because even if you are not planning to have room scale experiences or do not have the physical room for room scale experiences what we are talking about it is the ability to host them. Both the Rift and the HTC Vive can easily handle seated experiences.

So if you had asked me a couple of days ago which I would pick I would have said “I am all set; I have my Oculus Rift preorder in and will wait and see on the Vive.” Those who know me know I have been predisposed to the Rift for a very long time. I always felt that the Rift was a refined and beautiful product where the HTC Vive always looked a bit homespun and cumbersome.

I had made my decision for the Rift based on playing with the Oculus Rift CV1 at Oculus Connect last summer. After all I understood the merits of both systems since I had played to play with both last year. I valued hand tracking and the benefits of room tracking. I thought it was cool but I thought I could easily wait for the Oculus Touch controllers because my experience with them was nothing short of amazing. They felt great and in fact in many ways they are superior to the Vive controllers which are more like wands than a way of putting your hands into virtual reality.

I also will admit that I was a bit conflicted on the merit of the room scale experiences that I had some trepidations about just how many experiences there would be and how effective they are and that is AFTER experiencing it firsthand in the afternoon summer session.

A friend of mine who happened to be lucky enough to have his once in a lifetime “Oprah moment” at the Unity Vision AR/VR Summit where he was promised a free HTC Vive Pre invited my fiancée and I over for dinner with his wife. The entertainment beyond dinner ncluded an extended session with the HTC Vive Pre. The Vive Pre is essentially the consumer version (CV1) of the HTC Vive.

We immediately accepted as we both like good food and we thought it would be great to get to know the one another better. Getting the Vive just a day or so before our dinner was just a complete bonus as it was all set up and ready to go for us to play with. Truly a great evening.

I wanted Jun (my fiancée) to go first as I have tried to get her into VR with the hope she would carry the same enthusiasm that I have for it. She tried the Oculus Rift DK1 and got sick. She played with the DK2 and thought it was interesting for about 5 minutes and was done. She tried GearVR and liked it but still not really enthralled. If I couldn’t get her excited with a consumer ready device, then I would have to accept that VR is just not her thing.

My friend put her in and started her with Tilt Brush from Google. Tilt Brush is an app that lets you draw in 3D space. Your Vive controllers are mapped to an artist palette on your left hand and your right hand becomes a paint brush. You can freely walk around the space and paint to your hearts content. You can surround yourself with light and step out of it to look at your creation. It is an amazing immersive experience.

I watched as Jun danced around with the Vive controllers moving through the air. I heard her say “Cool!” every few minutes. She played with many features of Tilt Brush before we nudged her into a few more demos. All in all, she spent over an hour in the HTC Vive.

After she came out I asked her what the difference was between what she had experienced before and what happened with the Vive. She said it was three things—it was having a much better display which certainly the HTC Vive has but the key thing was the room based experience and hand tracking. She felt like she was there! She absolutely wants to have one in our house! Mission accomplished!

It was my turn. Understand that when I played with the Vive the first time it was last summer and I was pretty high on what I saw at Oculus Connect. Worse it was the not the Vive Pre but instead their development kit 1. It had tracking problems and the screen was good but not Oculus CV1 good. When I did the demo of the HTC Vive I only had about 15 minutes to play which was enough to get a taste but not enough to get schooled and yes, I got schooled.

I started the theBlu Encounter first since I had such a vivid memory of it from the summer session. This demo puts you on deck of a sunken ship where you can walk around. I immediately noticed the improved display and while I have not had an opportunity to try both the Oculus Rift CV1 and the Vive Pre next to one another I’d say the display was on par with what I remembered of CV1 at Oculus Connect. They’re both great. Those with more recent knowledge give the nod to the Oculus Rift CV1 due to slightly better optics. I suspect it is a subjective opinion at this point.

I ran through the demo nearly the same way I did the first time. The whale swam by and I was amazed. Then I decided to start the demo again this time playing with the tracking. I wanted to try things that you really couldn’t do in public. I tried getting on my hands and knees and looking inches away from the deck of the ship. Tracking was never lost. Then I had the idea to watch the remaining experience on my back looking up and that was also fantastic. Truly this experience is now part of my memory I was on that sunken ship that day and I did watch a whale swim by.

Then I tried Tilt Brush. The first time I played with it last summer I thought it was really cool but as I said before I had tracking issues where it would lose the controller and at one point the controller simply stopped working. I had played with Medium, Oculus’s clay sculpting product and liked it better though that is no fault of the Vive. Playing with clay is just more fun for me.

In playing with Tilt Brush this time everything worked perfectly. There were no tracking errors or dead controllers to contend with. I did similar tricks where I was on my knees again playing with my creation. This time though I was completely lost in my creation. I really do not know how long I was in there but I so enjoyed moving around the space and creating.

I then played with Fantastic Contraption. This is a fun game that also takes advantage of room scale and the Vive controllers. I built a car after an extensive tutorial and was busy solving puzzles. In that I was able to move around my creation and view it from many angles as I put together the puzzle. It was somewhere around this time that I snapped “I don’t want to wait for Oculus Touch and I don’t want to risk not being able to have true room scale tracking. I want the Vive.”

It was such an odd moment as I suddenly felt disappointment for my prior decision. It is as if I had somehow just decided to change teams. I imagined having the Vive set up and not wanting to tear things down so I could plug in a brand new Oculus Rift. I felt wrong for my backing of Oculus Rift for so long not so much because it was not great but rather my lack of ability to get just how superior the experience is with the Vive and what the exact potential is. I should have changed teams earlier. I really hate having to confess that my original assessment of the Vive was just wrong. I had entirely missed the point.

I thought about this all the way home and into the night. Why was I so moved where I wasn’t last summer? A couple of thoughts came forward. One obvious and truthful admission is that I am simply tired of waiting. I have been following the second rise of VR since just after the Kickstarter for DK1 and the idea of waiting another half year for Oculus Touch and not having the promise of room scale VR is just a bit much. So yes, impatience is really a part of the equation. Having confessed that however I think I can put together a few thoughts that helps me rationalize my feelings better—perhaps something more concrete than I just want what I want—now!

I think Lighthouse is better than Constellation as a technology.

I am not saying Lighthouse is perfect nor am I saying Constellation sucks. What I am saying is that if I were to award round 1 to the first product generation of VR I would have to give it to HTC Vive/Valve for having a technical advantage. Bottom line my experience proved hands down to me that the tracking system worked with amazing accuracy. When I think about the simplicity of Lighthouse it reminds me a bit of the genius behind GPS. Our GPS radios listen for signals and upon getting enough information they are able to triangulate where the radio is in a physical space. Lighthouse works by emitting laser beams in synchronization allowing the headset to triangulate its position in 3D space upon the laser light hitting the sensors.

This is an extremely simplified explanation of how Lighthouse works. It is genius in its simplicity and brilliant engineering. The fact that the headset and the controllers transmit the needed information after picking it off from the lasers produces much less compute overhead than software scanning video frames across multiple cameras as Constellation does.

Here is a question: If Oculus wanted to compete with the capability of Lighthouse would it require a third camera and how much computing overhead would that require? Three high speed cameras on 3 USB3 ports seems pretty compute intensive to me. Maybe they can do it with two—they have not said officially. I think as time moves forward Oculus will have to address this weakness in their design.

So that led me to my second realization. Everyone knows that this technology is going to iterate very quickly. The question is how fast and at what cost. I think that the HTC Vive first generation is going to have a longer life at home than the first generation Oculus Rift since at least on the hardware side Oculus out of the gate is in catch up mode if you just compare raw potential of the platforms. If you buy a Vive you will have room scale and seated tracking and you have hand tracking day one.

Platform Wars

In a way I am saddened that so early on we have two very different platforms developing that are bound to take things in two different directions both hardware wise and in software. Sure competition is great from a consumer perspective and it creates ultimately better product all around, but we’re already seeing people lining up (like I am) making a choice for a variety of reasons. Creating a division so early on in the VR renaissance

This division between technologies creates fragmentation. Oculus must have a software library that is able to pull customers to their platform. If everything was available on both systems, it would come down to the capability of the hardware and price. This means that Oculus is going to be very aggressive in securing titles for their platform going as far as to seed developers with money in the hopes to get their “Halo” app for the Rift. This exclusivity should be understood by everyone. Oculus needs to build a store in order to have a business. Valve already has this with a very established base of current customers. It is really a tough road for Oculus this next two years.

It could be that the ultimately the better titles are going to be on the Rift until the triple-A development houses get on board. I do admit that I will miss out on the opportunity to play Eve Valkyrie until the exclusivity expires for the title by my decision to select the Vive.

HTC Vive is Android; Oculus Rift is Apple (iPhone)

Let me go on a limb here and dare to compare the HTC Vive to Android phones and Oculus Rift to Apple and the iPhone.

So I know both of these platforms quite well as my day job has me managing the development of financial applications on both iOS and Android. Here is what I can tell you from hardened experience on both platforms. Android is the wild west to some extent. Google never really makes a product with a high gloss shine; they just iterate and over time if they don’t throw the product away it will become great-i.e. Google Maps. Android requires you to get involved with the operating system a lot more to keep things running correctly and while somewhat curated it is easy to get software that is just not up to par on Android. At times what you download may be at work doing devious or heavy battery consuming things. A real Android user is very experienced with mobile and likes this wild west outlook as it attracts cutting edge applications and things can happen first on the platform without a lot of Imperial meddling. Simply put it is an open platform which is yours to manage.

I think the HTC Vive & Valve fits this mindset perfectly. The Vive is not as refined as the Oculus Rift in fit and finish. The SteamVR store is there but not particularly user friendly and certainly not ready for grandma to use. It works; people know it and if you are a PC gamer you will be fine.

Apple on the other hand has two approaches that intertwine. They like polished products but are very stubborn about how it should work. They know what is best for you and in fairness they are often right. The product feels refined and as Steve Jobs famously said “It just works”.

I easily see this parallel when looking at what Oculus is offering with the Rift and their integrated store. They have rightly figured out that their success depends on their store and that the hardware is the vehicle to a business that derives revenue from the sale of software. The Oculus Rift is refined and has a great design esthetic. It is easy to install and the experience inside the Rift is polished. You will know from their curation efforts whether an experience is comfortable or not. You will also be able to count on installing applications and it just working. I think it is a very polished and well considered product and when the time comes grandma could use it and have a great time.

Which to buy then?

I think the decision you make for VR is going to be somewhat based on hardware potential and the software landscape ecosystem you want to be in. If you are a hard core PC gamer who builds PCs and already has a dozen games purchased from Steam, then the Vive is your VR headset. If you are wanting to get into this VR thing and you just want something that just works, then Oculus has a great product that will fit the bill nicely. There is really no bad choice between these two products just a choice based on who you are and what expectations you have for hardware products.

Now that my Android / iOS comparison is complete let me leave you with this final thought.

We saw in the Unity Vision VR/AR Summit keynote hosted by Unity’s CEO John Riccitiello that early adopters are going to dominate the space for the next two years with the true acceleration in adoption occurring in 2018. John spoke about the “gap of disappointment” that occurs between now and 2020 where he then agrees that VR/AR will explode. This gap he speaks of is where the industry analysts will start writing stories saying “VR fails the second time” when they don’t see the straight line trajectory to the moon that they expect as their thinking is that VR will be like smartphone adoption.

John astutely takes into account the costs of hardware since it not just a decision to buy a VR headset as you will also need to powerful enough PC to host it. Further John points out that content is truly going to be the driver and the great stuff is not going to happen for another 18-24 months.

That brings me to my point. PC gamers and vertical business ventures are going to start to take off in 2016 with the launch of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. What I am here to predict is that Oculus and their refined hardware/software product solution is not going to appeal to hard core PC gamer early adopters as much as having hardware with more potential and a rougher more open software experience once the word truly gets out. I think Oculus might be a bit too early in some ways for mainstream adoption since the content is not there to make this a must have for people’s homes. At least not yet.

In the end though Oculus could end up being the leader as they have been meticulous in their approach to this product. I am not convinced that Valve (and HTC for that matter) is entirely committed to this platform. I think they can make a better engineered product but a product for your home dedicated VR room for the family to play with I am less sure. We can’t ignore HTC’s financial situation and we also can’t ignore the social aspect that Facebook is going to add to the mix. If somehow the Metaverse ends up on the Oculus Rift as an exclusive title well my friends Oculus will have gone for the nuclear option in this new platform battleground as Social VR is powerful stuff.

I am not worried about either company. Ultimately it is good to have two very solid companies pursuing the dream of the holodeck for our homes.

Make your pick – you really can’t go wrong.