An amazing day at HTC Vive, trying SteamVR multiroom, Vive Wireless Adapter and Vive Focus gesture tracking

Two days ago, I’ve been at HTC Vive Chinese headquarters in Beijing. It has been a really amazing day, where I have been able to try some amazing HTC tech demos (more on this later on! Don’t miss it!) and especially to talk with some special people. I’ve been able to speak with three companies incubated in the Vive-X Beijing and also to know various HTC Vive employees.

Before talking about technology, I really want to spend some kind words for the Vive people. Everyone has been super kind to me: I really want to thank them all… starting from Bruce, that has assisted me during the whole day (he’s the cool guy in the header photo), Sharon that has organized all the meetings, Teresa that helped me with the Visa and Roy that showcased me some cool demos. Then, of course, there is Mister President, that has made all of this possible… and that, since he knows that my Note 4 has stopped working, has also generously gifted me a cool HTC U12+ phone, so that I can try the phone integration with the Vive Focus! Unluckily Mister President couldn’t be there because from great powers come great responsibilities, so he had to be in Taipei and I couldn’t observe him in his natural habitat and that made me a little sad. 🙁

The atmosphere in the office was really positive, everyone was very passionate and kind… I was surprised to know that there is a very relaxed attitude even for what concerns the competition. One of the employees even admitted that at home he sometimes uses an Oculus Rift and the various startups in the Vive-X are free to use Windows Mixed Reality headsets. So, while there are HTC and Oculus fanboys that hate each other, it seems that HTC people have absolutely no hate for Oculus. Bruce has even said that he is happy that there is Oculus, because, without competition, everyone would be too lazy, there would be no willingness to push the boundaries further… a smart competitor like Oculus is optimal to make them all try to do their best every day. Kudos to them for such an attitude, I myself have to learn from it.

So, yesterday, I’ve spent my day with great people. But I think that you’re more interested to read about some great technology, so here you are my impressions for some tech demos that the Vive team has made me try. Before starting, I want to warn you that I’ve tried everything for something like 5 minutes, so these are some first impressions and can’t substitute an in-depth review that comes from days of extended usage (like the one I made for the Vive Focus).

Vive Wireless Adapter

The Vive Wireless Adapter is that official gadget developed by HTC that serves to make the Vive Wireless. It consists of these parts:

• A little horn that you put on your headset (the antenna), that transmits the rotational and positional data of the headset to the PC and receives the images rendered by the PC to be shown on the screen;
• The battery, that you can attach to your belt, that powers the antenna through a little cable. It is expected to let you play for around three hours;
• A Wi-Gig receiver/transmitter that you can put on the screen of your PC and that has to be attached to the PCIe WiGig card of your PC. This is what handles the transmission on the PC side.

My experience with the Wireless Adapter has been awesome. While wearing the headset, I haven’t felt the presence of a wireless device on it at all, it was as wearing a tethered Vive Pro. The battery in my pocket was super-light, I immediately forgot it… it was so different from the big dildo that I had to wear with the TPCast v1.

The quality of the image was damn crisp. Roy put me in a SteamVR Home environment with stunning graphics and I was just amazed. The resolution of the Vive Pro with the quality of the experience made me excited. I tried to rotate my head fast, I tried to walk, I tried to move fast… and everything worked like a charm. I’ve also tried to put my hands and controllers next to the antenna and I had no issues. I noticed no difference between a wired Vive Pro and the wireless Vive Pro. It was really an amazing experience.

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Regarding the launch date, Roy told me that the official launch will happen “soon”.

SteamVR Multiroom setup

Some weeks ago, HTC published a video where its employees tried a new version of SteamVR beta that allows having a maximum of 16 Lighthouse v2 stations to create a multi-room setup. This means that for instance, you can track with SteamVR a whole house, provided that when you go from a room to another one, there is at least a Lighthouse station in the old room and one in the new room that track you simultaneously so that to let the transition happen.

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Being in HTC offices, I really wanted to try it. Roy explained to me that the technology is still in development and that in the future it could also be able to offer even more. He then gave me some details on how to put the Lighthouse stations in each room so that to optimize performance and on how to configure the whole VR setup on SteamVR. It has been interesting discussing technical details with him.

In HTC setup, they used six lighthouse stations, that let me go out from the original room (the one where I tried the wireless adapter) and enter a corridor, that I could navigate back and forth. In VR I could see an environment made with Tilt Brush that highlighted where the walls were, so to ensure safety. There was an exact match between the real and the virtual world.

Trying it, I was like “woooooaah”: I was a bit scared of navigating between different rooms guided only by some lines drawn in Tilt Brush, but everything worked perfectly. I was even able to find a sofa (that was highlighted in the virtual world) and sit on it, virtually and actually. The Chaperone was configured correctly, so it followed the shape of the multi-room environment, too. The thing that surprised me the most was that I really noticed NO SEAMS. The tracking worked awesomely in all rooms, even in the transition points (that I haven’t noticed in VR). Awesome stuff.

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I think that this can be really interesting for arcades or for training experiences, for instance. I also started speculating with my mind how this can be useful not only to track Vive headsets, but also every headset onto which have been installed SteamVR Tracking v2 sensors (the ones of Triad Semiconductor), or Vive Trackers… so even a Samsung Gear VR with a Vive Tracker on could be tracked across a whole house. An affordable technology with lots of possible future applications.

Vive Focus 6 DOF gesture tracking

Soon, on the Vive Focus, you will be allowed to use your hands to interact with the virtual environment, without using your controller thanks to HTC Vive gesture tracking. After having seen the demo of such a system in the videos of the VEC Conference in Shenzhen, I really wanted to try it and HTC people have kindly satisfied my request.

The main critic of people watching the above video was that the lag seems damn high, but it wasn’t clear if it was because of the screen mirroring or because of actual performance. Even the accuracy was not clear from the video.

Well, after having tried it I can say that the system is promising, but it still needs some fixes: in fact, HTC people told me that it is still a work in progress and not a finished product.

It can tracks five gestures: fist, pointing, ok, thumbs up, hand open. The gesture detection works on both hands simultaneously and it performed well: it always detected correctly my gestures. It also detected the 3D position in space of my hands. The FOV of the detection is around 70°, meaning that basically your hands gets detected as soon as its virtual counterpart is still in the FOV of the headset… so the field of view is enough. Regarding the reactiveness, there was a delay of around half a second between my movements and the response of the system. So, not terrible as in the videos, but still not perfect for VR. Furthermore, the detection was a bit intermittent, meaning that while moving my hands, sometimes the tracking got lost for some little time and then immediately recovered.

People explained to me that the problems that I have experienced are due to the little computational power of a standalone headset (if compared to a PC), that require lots of optimization and approximation efforts to make things to work. Anyway, they are confident that they will be able to make it works smoothly soon.

I think that at the current stage, the technology is satisfying to make an app reactive to discrete gestures (e.g. an app where you can make an ok sign to your virtual tutor to tell him to go on), but still not optimal to make an app where you need continuous gesture tracking (e.g. where you can zoom objects by moving the hands closer and further), because you may have glitches.

I can’t wait it will be finalized.

6 DOF Controller

They couldn’t make me try the 6 DOF controller emulation, but they told me that it is based on the same technology of the gestures tracking, so I can expect similar performances. This means that I can imagine that it is on the right track, but still needs refinements to work perfectly.

I really can’t wait for all these technologies to be distributed in the market, because they can really make VR perform some steps forward. And I really can’t wait to return in the future to HTC offices to try other demos and have chats with interesting people. In the meanwhile, HTC will be at the upcoming ChinaJoy exhibition in Shanghai and who knows what other cool stuff they will showcase! I’ll keep an eye on that and I will let you know… are they going to reveal some new detail on these technologies?

If you have questions about what I’ve tried, just ask me in the comment section. And don’t be shy, subscribe to my newsletter, too! 😉