[dshankar]

Both the Vive and the Rift have head tracking. Positional head tracking has been around since 2014.

The Vive has "room-scale" tracking that lets you walk around a large room-sized space, and includes hand controllers that are also tracked in the world.

The Rift should support "room-scale" with more cameras, but is not a main focus/supported use case yet for Oculus. The Oculus Touch is like the Vive's tracked hand controllers.

They are far more similar to each other than most people realize.

It is unlikely to be obsolete in 1 year. The update/release cycle for VR headsets (at least for Oculus) is expected to be somewhere between consoles (6-8 years) and smartphones (1 year).

Pricing will be announced on Jan 6 morning and should help you decide.

Note: I work full-time developing VR software and own every VR headset.

[TranquilMarmot]

Thank you for clarifying the tracking differences, didn't realize the Rift had added so much. I'm interested in room-scale tracking, but my apartment is pretty tiny so I'm not sure I would actually get to use it (so maybe the Vive would be overkill)

Interesting to think about obsolescence of the headsets- I wonder if it will be tied to graphics cards getting more powerful and allowing for higher resolutions or more "breakthroughs" in the headset hardware itself, i.e. lenses and screens and eye tracking.

[sp332]

The maximum Vive space is 15x15 feet, and I don't own one but I've heard that it handles different scales pretty gracefully.

[TranquilMarmot]

I've tried the Vive in a smaller space and the way it handles walls is pretty intuitive (it puts a "ghost" grid where the wall is when you get close to it). I guess I'm more concerned about how developers handle small spaces- surely not every application/game out there will accommodate for a 10x10 or even a 5x5 space

[strictnein]

Is the Vive wireless? Room-scale tracking + wires seems suboptimal.

[dshankar]

No desktop VR headset is wireless today, and won't be for the foreseeable future due to latency and bandwidth requirements.

Wires are suboptimal but tracked wires (just like the headset is tracked. i.e. you'll see the wire in VR) should alleviate this problem until wireless technologies mature.

Mobile VR will provide room-scale tracking without wires in 2016. Watch this space.

[shpx]

Good discussion of why you can't stream VR experiences [0]. Also, streaming VR kills privacy.

Positional tracking with a smartphone's built in camera is already possible[1] thanks to SLAM[2]. Let me say that again, Google Cardboard and GearVR can (technologically) do positional tracking, right now.

The reason they don't is probably because you have to spend time scanning your room. But that's a really poor reason, I agree with OP, we should expect to see this happen very soon.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3axtxl/streaming_to...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7bjsIqlbS0

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...

[HillRat]

Wireless solutions would introduce too much latency, so you're always tethered to a box. It takes some getting used to, and I definitely wouldn't recommend a lot of running and jumping, but it's not a major complicating factor in my experience (though that's in an office environment that was set aside for VR testing, so a home installation may differ significantly). Personally, even though the movement area is limited and the wires are relatively cumbersome, I've found the Vive experience much more immersive.