Vive reveals Tracker price and other stuff at MWC 2017

Yesterday finally we got to know the price of the Vive Tracker and all other add-ons Vive revealed at CES! If you forgot what I’m talking about, you can have a look at my wonderful previous post about it or you can go on to refresh your memory.

Basically Vive got lot of hype announcing the Vive Tracker, that is a single sensor that is tracked thanks to SteamVR Lighthouse system and through which you can obtain the position of a single point inside your VR environment with great precision. Tracker is wireless and works thanks to a battery. It streams data via USB (there is a USB dongle you have to put inside your PC ports). Thanks to Vive tracker you can track multiple objects inside your room (you just put a tracker attached to each object) or even the human body (you put trackers on the main joints of your body and obtain all the rest through inverse kinematics).

Vive announces Tracker (and Audio Strap) at CES 2017

This is the week of CES, so, after Christmas vacations were there has not been even a single news about VR, we’re being flooded by super-interesting news.

We were all waiting for Vive announcements and HTC is not disappointing us at all. There will be no Vive 2, but 2 big things have been announced today: the Deluxe Audio Strap and the Vive Tracker.

How a developer can reduce motion sickness in VR games

Some times ago I made a quite successful post about how to experience virtual reality reducing your simulation sickness. After that, I also published a deeper insight on simulation sickness where I described how this issue depends on age, sex and race of the person experiencing virtual reality. People have asked me to make another kind of post: if you are a developer and don’t want to give motion sickness to your users… what can you do? So, here you are, with some advices on how to make your users puke less.

First of all, absolutely, in any case, don’t make the camera move without an explicit action of the user. Please, don’t. I know that making some cinematic sequences with camera moving on the play area is very cool, but it’s also very nausea inducing… so, it’s not a good idea. The reason is the same that I described in my previous articles (read them if you want to understand better what motion sickness is!): your body stays still, but your eyes see movement; the brain thinks that this sensorial mismatch is due to some kind of poison and so trigger its defenses, that are nausea and stuff (come on brain, what awful defenses you have! 🙂 ). This is a very basic concept, but I continue seeing lots of demos with automatic camera movements. Camera MUST move only under consent of the user.

Oculus vs Vive: November 2016 update

One of the biggest disputes of the virtual reality world is: it is better Oculus Rift or HTC Vive? There is no accepted answer to this question: lots of people have tried to make a comparison (me too, with this post) but there is not a headset that is truly superior to the other one. Besides that, virtual reality has been ruined by fanboyism, so there are lots of idiots giving biased reviews just because they’re fan of one headset or the other one.

The problem of all those reviews (mine included) is that they refer to the situation that holded until summer 2016. After that, lots of things have changed: autumn has been a hot season for VR, with lots of announcements by Oculus, HTC, Microsoft and Google. I think that a recap including the latest news is necessary, so to make a more effective comparison at current state of art. So, what is the current situation of this endless war between these two great virtual reality devices? Let me try to write some points:

Main Specs

It’s a tie: FOV, framerate, resolution, etc… are almost identical in the two contestants. Someone says that Oculus has slightly better visual quality, but it’s almost non-noticeable.

HTC Vive 2 will cost less than the first version?

Some days ago I read a super interesting article on RoadToVR: it was about a new kind of sensors that could reduce the overall cost of Lighthouse technology of the HTC Vive. You can find it here.

I published the article on reddit, where it gained a lot of interest… 466 karma points! W00t! A record for me! But why is this so important? And what are we talking about?

Is PSVR going to rule VR market?

Hello everyone! Today I just want to write down some thoughts and start a discussion with you. The topic is the third important headset that is going to be released: PSVR.

PSVR is the headset of the Playstation, that you can plug directly in your Playstation 4 and have virtual reality straight from your console! As controllers you can use PS Move, so you can have the exact setup of the other competitors, with an high-end HMD and two controllers in your hands.