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At a press event organized by the companies, the HTC Vive, in San Francisco, we learned the release of the Vive Focus in the West in North America and Europe, as well as the price. But these will only be available with a single 3DOF motion controller similar to those provided with Oculus Go and Daydream View. HTC has opened development kit applications for 6DOF motion controllers, such as those provided with the future Oculus Quest headphones (or those already shipped with Vive and Rift). HTC had two of these controllers available today for demonstrations.
To try them
My demo was with Vive Sync, a professional collaboration platform. I will save the details of the particular application in a separate story because I want to focus on the controllers themselves.
To be clear, this is a development kit. They are not finished and there is no commercial availability time. That being said, I was very impressed.
Since Vive Sync is primarily a meeting application, it did not take much movement. The ideal use case is to stand up, point fingers and talk. I had to invent movements to test the controllers and their follow-up. First, a fast movement.
There was certainly some latency. If I was trying to play Beat Saber, for example, on this device with the 6DOF development kit controllers, I think I would have had a lot of problems. This could be fixed in time, but for now, it was almost as if my hands in virtual reality were a half-second late when I was moving very fast. I have never tried the Oculus Quest development kit (Santa Cruz), but I imagine that these controllers also improve during development, as is usually the case.
They impressed me with the accuracy of position and rotation tracking. No matter where I held the controller (even when I grabbed the tracking ring itself), they never lost track. The only problem is to put them behind my head or behind my back and put them back quickly in front of my body. After a second or two, they would be located again.
Above: The Vive Focus Development Kit
Image credit: UploadVR
To test something that I have often done in virtual reality applications, I tried to teleport myself in the back. Vive Sync does not have a fluid locomotion, he teleports. As a result, while speaking with a developer, he asked me to make a backup copy to be able to show me a 3D model in the meeting environment. So I instinctively reached behind my back, pointed and clicked on the trackpad to teleport as I have already done in a million VR applications before and everything worked fine. To test this further, I grabbed the laser pointer tool from the interface, hand in the back, and could still point the laser through my virtual reality body accurately. I do not think I could reach precisely behind me and get down to a table to take something, but I did not try it either.
Oculus Quest's controllers had no way of tracking when you did not look at the ring itself. So, if I rotate the controllers in my hand, as if to bounce a ball on a tennis racket, they disappear. I was not playing a real-time game with the Focus 6DoF controllers, but when I tried to replicate this move, they did not lose track of their tracking. The latency and slight delay of the movements were still noticeable, far more than with the latest Oculus Quest demo that I had tried at OC5.
To use the 6DOF controllers, you need to clip a front panel on the front of the Vive Focus that plugs into a port on the top.
Physically, they are extremely similar to Windows VR controllers, although they are smaller, lighter and without a controller. They are very comfortable and feel easy to use. The buttons below the trackpad seemed a bit awkward. It was strange to have two buttons under the trackpad instead of one above and one below, like the standard Vive sticks.
This story was first published on UploadVR, our syndication partner..
This story originally appeared on Uploadvr.com. Copyright 2018
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