[dogma1138]

You are not going to have room size experience with any of those headsets at home at least it's not feasible you are tethered with so much crap that you need a man servant walking after you ensuring that you don't hang yourself on that tether.

If you want a room size experience just hook up 2 OR cameras it will work the same way (but better) as the lighthouse approach that HTC took, and you can hook upto 50 of those cameras currently to track I believe up-to a 100 players.

As far as commercial room sized experience goes Vive is sub optimal, it's heavy, wobbly, doesn't have good audio support and you can't currently track more than 5 people at the time and since Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

[ohaal]

> You are not going to have room size experience with any of those headsets at home at least it's not feasible you are tethered with so much crap that you need a man servant walking after you ensuring that you don't hang yourself on that tether.

Depends on the size of your play area obviously, but looks pretty good from this[0], and this "crap" you're talking about doesn't seem very bothersome.

> If you want a room size experience just hook up 2 OR cameras it will work the same way (but better) as the lighthouse approach that HTC took, and you can hook upto 50 of those cameras currently to track I believe up-to a 100 players.

Better how? I haven't seen a good comparison of them yet. I'm curious tho, how do you intend to scale up to 100 players using USB3 connections? That would be a MASSIVE amount of data flowing through the computer powering all of this(, the reason it requires USB3 is because it needs 60Hz high resolution image to have good tracking). The Vive takes a completly different approach by having the headset (and controllers) catch and interpret the (infrared) light emitted by the (dumb) lighthouses.[1]

> you can't currently track more than 5 people at the time

Do you have a source for this? I can't seem to find anything about this. Is it a limitation of the hardware or the software?

> Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

I'd be very surprised if this was true. Everything I've read seems to indicate lighthouse is built to be scalable from the ground up. The whole idea of it being wireless, only requiring a power outlet, makes it infinitely more scalable than any USB3 solution.

Again, would appreciate sources for any of your claims because I can't seem to find any of them...

EDIT: Here is a more indepth look at how the lighthouse technology actually works, because you seem slightly misinformed: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/05/17/valves-lighthouse-trac...

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIEuB7H9TOE

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/40877n/vive_lighthous...

[dogma1138]

>Depends on the size of your play area obviously, but looks pretty good from this[0], and this "crap" you're talking about doesn't seem very bothersome.

That's not a room experience they aren't moving, rotation slight side to side movement isn't an issue. If you haven't been to the demo's look at the demo's from CES/PAX/Gamescon for VR headsets that actually do whole room experience.

>Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

You can't install more than 2 lighthouses it's the current system limit I'm not sure what is surprising now, HTC said that future versions might have support for multiple trackers and that they are working with their commercial partners on another set of trackers that could both sense other trackers and have a wider spectrum range to support large scale commercial installations.

In the Vive demo's I've been too they went as far as putting up partitions in order to prevent interference if they were running multiple demos at the same time.

>Do you have a source for this? I can't seem to find anything about this. Is it a limitation of the hardware or the software?

That was the figure that was talked about during the demos, upcoming promotional events like http://virtuallydead.co.uk/ also limit it, I would say the limit is probably both in hardware and software but mainly "hardware" atm since the Vive room tracking only works when the room is upto 15 sq. feet anyhow (and technically only works when the room is at least around 15 sq. feet to begin with).

[ohaal]

I'll just leave these here (vk2zay is Alan Yates, "Chief Pharologist[2] at Valve Corporation"):

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/3wwpi0/want_more_info...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/39i71o/room_scale_r...

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