Hands on: HTC Vive Pre

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http://l2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/.ppcqWn7x2KmUZSILiQQJg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3NfbGVnbztmaT1maWxsO2g9ODY7cT03NTt3PT EzMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/digital_trends_973/4cec7d917bb0cca47dc1da7eb4b7759b (http://news.yahoo.com/hands-htc-vive-pre-111556223.html)Nine months ago, the HTC Vive changed my perception of virtual reality. I described my first experience with the Vive as “frightening, astounding, surreal,” but mostly, it was unforgettable. Like a Star Trek holodeck come to life, the Vive uses laser-emitting “Base Stations” on the wall to create up to a 15 by 15 foot virtual reality world inside your living room. You put on a mask, grab two motion controllers, and off you go, exploring another universe in your own home. But leaving our world and entering a virtual Vive holodeck has consequences. It feels empowering to turn your room into a video game, but it also alienates you from everyone and everything around you. While you euphorically prance around your living room, you do so with a mask that blinds you and headphones that render you nearly deaf. It’s a recipe-for bruised shins, wall crashes, and heckling-friends. At CES this year, HTC and Valve Software showed us their new plan to save some shins and faces from harm by giving virtual-reality users their sight back. Thanks to a front-facing camera, the new Vive Pre lets you exist in two worlds at once. Seeing the world behind blue-eyes Previously, when a user-approached the boundary of the square playing area, the Vive would fade a grid into view, showing neon bright lines marking the virtual prison walls of the home holodeck. The boundary grid looked something like those laser background yearbook photos we all remember from the 1990s. Thanks to the new camera on the front of the Vive Pre, approaching the grid now shows you the outline of the objects and people in the room with you. And it’s all in vivid teal — HTC calls it “Chaperone mode.” I’ve only used it-for a few minutes, but I don’t really want to Vive without it. If you want to pause your game, you can also turn the real world back on at any time by double tapping a button on either of the Vive controllers. This dissolves your game space and recreates the real world around you in a darker, more detailed, shade of teal. This allowed me to find a real chair someone put in the middle of my virtual game space and sit in it. Like one of those trust falls you do at camp, I half expected to fall right to the ground. It takes a lot of trust to sit in what appears to be an animated chair, even if you know it’s real. But the chair was where it appeared to be, and I sat down, relieved and giddy. With the Chaperone mode, HTC and Valve have opened the door to an endless string of ideas. Like Microsoft’s HoloLens, the Vive can now merge the virtual world with our own, making our world more magical and the games we play more real. It can blend and mold our world into something entirely new, demonstrating what may soon become-fact. For virtual reality to truly take off, it must also include a way to augment and connect to the real world. Improvements beyond the eyes I’m waxing poetic on the implications of the Vive’s front camera, but it’s only one of a host of improvements HTC has made. The Vive looks very different than the 3D-printed monstrosity I tried on almost a year ago. The headset has thicker pads and is far more comfortable to wear, with replaceable lenses and a mesh strap that rests above your ears, like a good pair of glasses. It’s still covered in random craters, like the surface of the moon if you shined it up and spray painted it black. These craters house the laser sensors, which receive data from the two Base Stations attached on two walls of the room. It’s going to be awkward to set the Base Stations-up in many homes, due to the fact they must be some distance away from the user, but the result is motion detection that’s so perfect, it makes interaction with the virtual world indistinguishable from our own. The graphics on many games may still be cartoony, but the feeling you get playing them is fluid and fun. And that’s thanks to the elaborate tracking sensors. Bill Roberson/Digital Trends Bill Roberson/Digital Trends Bill Roberson/Digital Trends Bill Roberson/Digital Trends You’ll need a fancy PC with all the latest bells and whistles to run the Vive Pre, and the headset still has to connect to a PC-over-a long cord. Thankfully you can at least see the cord now, so you won’t trip on it as much. The pair of-controllers provide the final piece of the puzzle. They look and feel like upgraded Nintendo Wii Remotes, complete with a trigger on the back, but they also have touchpads on the front, just like your laptop keyboard. On the sides are buttons you can press with your palm or gripping fingers. It’s a simple setup, but it gives you virtual hands that can interact with the virtual world. The controllers now manage-about four hours per charge, and you can juice them up with any Micro USB cord. A blue whale stared into my soul Like last year, the first demo I tried was the undersea ship wreck. This demo places you at the bottom of the ocean on an old rotting wooden ship. I didn’t need a scuba tank, but I had to swat some fish away with my hands. Leaning over the edge of the ship and peering down an endless cliff filled me with fear. I routinely hop and fly around regular video games all the time — but this was-no regular game. Even though I knew it was coming, I still found myself leaning back to avoid the tail fin of a giant blue whale, and when it stopped to stare at me, I felt a little judged. I felt more emotional connection to that-blue whale than most characters in my lifetime of gaming. Bill Roberson/Digital Trends I played one more demo called Job Simulator, by Owlchemy Labs. Apparently, in the future, robots completely run the world and the word “job” is meaningless. But our robot overlords are curious metal folks, and want to understand what the hell we humans used to do all day. So they made a job simulator … so you can learn how “to job.” The game dumped me in a-fun, animated office, where I could toss around and play with everything I saw. I picked up the telephone, stapled things, tried to use the scanner and copy machine, ate a rotten donut that made me vomit, used my office PC, and more. It was mostly a fun demo to show the capability of the controllers, but I can’t wait to play the final game, which will have many more “jobs” to try. A rep from-Owlchemy Labs-told me the game will launch around the same time the Vive does. Oculus be damned, this is the future The Oculus Rift is now on sale for $600, and the HTC Vive will likely cost even more when it arrives in homes this-April. I don’t think it matters. No other VR headset can immerse users like the Vive, and the Vive Pre takes a huge leap forward by including a camera that connects its virtual holodeck space to the real people and objects in a-room. That-eliminates the alienation felt when-wearing a virtual reality headset, which is normally blinding, and may lead to games and apps that transform real world objects and people, rather than ignoring them. I’m still excited about Oculus Rift,-can’t wait to see more from the HoloLens, and the Gear VR won the Digital Trends Product of the Year for 2015, but damn it, I’m putting my virtual money on the HTC Vive. This is virtual reality. Everyone else needs to catch up. Still interested? Read more of our best HTC Vive coverage: Hands on: HTC Vive VR headset HTC’s Vive demo proves adventure games could see a VR-powered renaissance Climbing Mt. Everest in VR is so terrifying that my knees wobbled Spec showdown: Oculus Rift vs. HTC Vive



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