this is my vr setup and it's remained largely unchanged since the launch of
the original htc vive back in 2016. my
controllers and all my charging cables my headset all kind of go in here i mean
yeah i guess i upgraded to the single tether rather than the triple one and i
did finally do some cable management for my lighthouses actually a couple months
back but that's it because honestly there hasn't been
anything that i would have considered to be enough of an upgrade to actually
invest more money in it until today
so valve finally launched
their index vr headset
and while it's not available in canada yet
i pulled some strings and managed to get my hands on one
so time to take it for a test drive and see if it's worth a thousand us dollars
speaking of worth it the marlin screwdriver set from ifixit features
five specialty precision screwdrivers check it out today at ifixit.com forward
slash Linus
even though htc and valve split ways on the vr hardware side of things for
obvious reasons a lot of my comparisons today are going to be against the
original htc vive which for my purposes
has been the best vr headset still i didn't find the vive pro to be a
particularly compelling upgrade especially at its price and the oculus
touch controllers with their index finger presence didn't really add enough
to any of my game experiences to find them worthwhile especially in light of
the fact that to get a large play area like i have
i would need to add extra camera sensors and that sort of thing
so let's go ahead and do the definitely fresh first time ever unboxing
experience so the first thing that's new in here is of course the steamvr
basestation 2.0 so these use their new tracking method that allows a 10 by 10
meter play area versus a 5 by 5 meter play area
not that i have room for that necessarily and should theoretically be
more reliable and quieter because they only have one spinning motor versus two
spinning like laser arrays that help track within the room
so physically compared to the old lighthouses
the most notable things are the wider field of view the smaller size
and of course the lack of any type of support for a synchronization cable
right here but with that said unless you need to take
advantage of the wider play space or you want to be able to use more than just a
couple of lighthouses for like warehouse scale vr there's actually no compelling
reason as far as i've found yet to upgrade from these to these unless like
me you're looking to flip your old vive as a complete kit and upgrade entirely
to the new steamvr 2.0 compatible gear
with your index headset one really nice thing about the new lighthouses is that
they're actually a drop-in replacement
so you can use everything from your existing mounts to your existing cables
to get it running with that said i'm probably going to have to replace this
power adapter eventually because as part
of the process of selling my old vibe they're actually going to need this power brick because it's rated for about
three times the power output of the new one that comes with the index
all right now let's talk about the new headset because
arguably this is where the biggest upgrade that most
people will care about is happening the valve index is equipped with a number of
things that are a significant upgrade over the original vive in here is the
vast majority of the tech that compelled me to upgrade so some of the stuff i
don't care about quite so much so it's got these near field flat panel speakers
that are kind of you can see they're adjustable this way and they can go up
and down so these are meant to sit kind of near your ears you can tell they're
at a bit of an angle so they fire directly into your ear canal they've got
interpupillary distance adjustments right here
this is a cool one so this knob on the back actually lets you adjust how close
or how far the lenses sit from your eyes we'll play around with that a little bit
later and oh right here at the front you've
got a couple of cameras this time around it's going to come down to game developers how this ends up getting used
and then behind the front here maybe we can do this peel whoop
there we go okay behind the front panel here we've got an expansion bay that has
a usb 3 port so this could be used for any number of things um smell accessory
um you know maybe like a hand presence module from someone like
magic leap for example the biggest thing for me though
is right here so we've got two 1600 by
1440 lcd displays that perhaps even more
importantly than their increase in resolution run at
120 hertz versus 90 hertz on the original vive and valve is even offering
an experimental 144 hertz mode so i am expecting that to
decrease motion sickness for my wife and then i am also expecting it to improve
the overall smoothness and realism of the virtual experience now
one other thing that i was sort of on the fence about was of course i
mentioned it's an lcd display rather than an OLED display but valve is
pitching this as a benefit so they seem to think the black levels are still good
enough and you get reduced screen door effect because instead of using a
pentile matrix you've got full RGB subpixels for each pixel let's see how
that works out oh yeah right there's one other big thing the lenses you can tell
just looking at them the manufacture of the lenses is much more complex and
we've got much finer concentric circles going around them i'm hoping this will
result in less distortion in spite of the indexes significantly wider field of
view than the original vive now valve isn't actually quoting a specific field
of view on this headset and it seems to be because when you adjust it with the
knob right here it actually changes but they are saying it's quite a bit wider
than the original vive comfort wise
honestly it's a bit of a mixed bag for me right out of the gate now i was
always a fan of the uh the strap system of the
original vive rather than the kind of the the headset system of the rift and
the vive pro but i think with a certain amount of
adjustment here on the top and at the back it should be all right a
couple of other nice things comfort wise is that if you don't manage to dial it
in valve actually provided 3d models so you could theoretically go ahead and
print your own magnetic face shield here
also for smaller heads or for people who just want like a big cushy memory foam
thing at the back of their head you can go ahead and pop this in
my five-year-old daughter was not able to play
until i put this in and then she was actually able to mostly sort of fit the
headset on at least enough to play a little bit of fruit ninja now let's talk
about the connections unlike the original vive there's no breakout box so
instead you've just got a simple what looks like a miniaturized DisplayPort
here that's like a safety breakaway cable and then that splits out into
power in usb 3 which is used for the front accessory and the cameras and then
of course displayport because of the higher resolution and refresh rate HDMI
is not suitable for the vive index so you will need a displayport graphics
card with that said at that kind of resolution and refresh rate you weren't
going to be driving it without something that has DisplayPort on it anyway now
one difference that i noticed is that unlike the lighthouses the
headset itself actually draws considerably more power than the
original vive so i did end up needing to
use the valve index power adapter now this new cable configuration is actually
going to cause a little bit of hassle for my setup because my pc is over on
this side and then what i've done here is i've put my breakout box
over here and then i actually anchored the bottom
of my cable under my console so that i couldn't accidentally rip it out because
i actually found that in particular when i first started i used to do that a lot
so the reason i like having it come out here is because it's closer to the
center of my play space whereas now i just have no choice i'm going to have
to plug directly into the back of the pc now one thing to note about steamvr 2.0
is that while it does support a much larger playspace there doesn't appear to
be any sort of solid plan for actually making that experience
accessible for the time being unless you want to invest in one of those backpacks
because i haven't actually measured them side by side here but it seems like the
tethers are a very similar length and in all likelihood that comes down pretty
much to the limitations of 3 and displayport over great distances
it's a lot of data and any reduction in the signal integrity
can cause the connection to fail outright okay so this is it time for
room setup room scale
next establish tracking
all right so these are them
the legendary knuckles controllers
so the big exciting thing about these is this
you actually don't need to hold on to the index controllers at all with your
hand so they've got this adjustable strap on them you can change the angle
by pushing it in like this and then you can change the tightness of the strap
with this little doodad right here and then it uses sensors all along the
grip here to detect the position of your fingers even from
within vr now of course this functionality is going to count on game
developers to support it so we'll have to have a look at that but
it opens up a lot of fascinating possibilities there's your menu button
there's your a and b this is a touch sensitive button you can actually feel
the haptic feedback of it right now and then each one has a joystick they are
symmetrical well this is it
better be amazing
wow that text is clear
some people have complained that it doesn't have enough granularity but
honestly it didn't feel like a problem for me now i don't know if beat saber is
a fair measure of the performance of the integrated headphones but i gotta find
out sooner or later if i'm gonna have to use iems or
over-the-ear headphones now one thing i noticed immediately
actually a couple things is that while beatsaber technically
supports the index there's no finger presence in the game
whatsoever so just holding like a you know like a big
meat handle was just fine the way that it was
uh also the sabers come out at sort of an
unnatural angle for me and as far as i know there's no real way to adjust that
in the game that's that's actually really annoying
now this is nice having the menu button recessed like that man the number of
times i've accidentally hit the menu button on the old controllers
countless especially in this game it's really frustrating
that is a nice upgrade
so my initial impressions of the comfort of
the device were actually not that great i ended up with some pressure points on
my nose the first night i tried it but having played around with the adjustment
a little more trying to get the weight off the front of the unit um
actually right now it's pretty good
i still do wish that it was more of a a strap-on experience
but credit to the speakers now depending
what you're doing in vr they do leak a fair bit of sound so you might not want
to use them you might want to stick with your iems or closed back headphones but
uh if you don't mind people around you being able to hear what's going on they
actually sound shockingly good like i don't think i would bother
grabbing iems there is actually a headphone jack it's
super hidden away in there somewhere it's like
it's like deep inside that hole there
but you know i just don't think i'd bother so this is interesting gorn doesn't
specifically have support for the index but you can actually see
they're actually using my middle finger oh
okay well that that works but you actually don't have to
put down these ones and you can see there's be nice if you could actually adjust the
zones what made it peace sign oh
you have got to be kidding me climbing the tv thing cat
did you just knock over my switch oh cat
oh man he's so bad shadow
look i know i know you're only doing what
daddy taught you but that is not what we do
other than the weird middle finger to clench control i'd say
everything is pretty intuitive
man you can really tell looking at things up close
how much better this display is like there is hardly any screen door effect
on these at all i mean it's there trust me it's there
and as things get further away you do you do see the aliasing and the
shimmering but
this is a legitimate generational step forward compared to
something like the vibe it's huge i mean the whole idea behind the index is is
hand presence right so you you don't have to
grab on to anything but the thing is like if i have to press a button here to
move around or i have to use a joystick to move around or whatever else
the the instinct the instinct is to hold on to
whatever's in your hands but let's see how this goes
oh see i let go of my spirit dang that's never a good idea when you're in a
gladiator fight i really need a better weapon
all right oh bow and arrow i want that bow don't don't waste my
arrows
my arrows oh
oh right because middle finger okay it's hard to say how much of this is
me not being used to it and how much of this is bad game control mapping but i
do not find the hands as intuitive to operate as i did with the original vive
controllers in this particular title let's try something else so arizona
sunshine is a game that happens to be specifically listed as index compatible
index ready and check this out guys
oh what the
right there full individual finger control
so one of the things i'm going to be looking at here is the performance with
the valve index because my setup is only using a 980 ti which i
have found to be perfectly suitable for my vr gaming needs
but i suspect that i might run into some hiccups see
there's little things like you see that i'm moving my thumb around but it doesn't like move my thumb on the gun it
doesn't move my pinky on the gun so like the game is supported but it's also
it's not like it's not like it's like oh this is
this is so immersive and different i don't have any issues with the uh
angle of the stuff i'm holding in this game though which is nice
okay so this is great i was poking around at a couple of things one i found
the wrist straps and two i was checking some performance diagnostic stuff from
within steamvr and i don't even have 120 hertz on yet
so the image clarity benefits that i've been
observing have actually all been down to the better
pixel response time so the lower persistence of the image like there's
almost no traces behind objects so you
get that increase in clarity it's not running at a higher frame rate yet so i
gotta restart steamvr and give this another shot
so this is one that i found really frustrating to play
on the vive because i'm a badminton player not a tennis player and so my
natural tendency when i'm holding a racquet is to flick with my wrist
as opposed to swing my ARM so the issue
with that is that when you swing your ARM
look how many tracking points it has to figure out you know where your
racket was when you flick your wrist it only has a handful and it has to kind
of guess so what i had really hoped
was that the increased refresh rate would
i don't know i and i had hoped that the trackers were better i actually hadn't done a ton of research into this thing
before i started playing with it so i hoped it would make this game playable for me
so i guess we'll find out
yeah same same thing whoops that's not what i meant to do
yeah see i swing at it and i just i just miss
you know i know it's typical gamer things blame the game not the player but
like yeah you just you have to swing like
this you know maybe it feels a little
smoother it's hard to tell if it's just because i was playing last night too
though and i've hadn't played this game in a while and i'm getting back into the
swing of it pun intended one curious thing is that
even though i didn't notice much more granular tracking
my wife did notice that she got significantly less motion sickness she
was never actually able to play games like beat saber before but even running
at 90 hertz she was able to play for half an hour and came out of er with no
motion sickness whatsoever so that is a big step forward so one of the real
trade-offs with the index is that you've got to decide between
i would say increased comfort in some ways with the lenses further from your
eyes and increased field of view i think that's a big part of why valve doesn't
want to quote that number it's because it really depends heavily on how close
you're able to bring the lens to your eye before it starts to actually like get in
the way and like touch your eyelashes
i do have to say that i'm glad that they prioritized
other aspects of the headset over just field of view
where like pimax went for like maximum field of view and introduced a bunch of
distortion this looks really good
i haven't actually commented much on how the the finer lenses have been in game
and it's amazing it's a huge contributor to the the better visual fidelity like
everything looks smoother the less jaggies you can have
on things obviously the better in games right
this is actually another game that i beat my all-time high score on almost
immediately after upgrading to the index and i wasn't even like going max high
score necessarily like i wasn't trying to snipe all the balloons in between waves and stuff hey
hey there it is
i gotta say i find the uh the plastic of the handles actually a little bit
kind of harsh to hold on to it feels like it would have been nice if they had a bit of a soft touch to them especially
because these are things that you're gonna be wearing for a long time at a time and uh probably sweating onto if
you're if you play vera like me anyway
you're a sweaty person like me
what are we at fifteen two fifteen fifteen six nine five that's my high
score i don't have much gait health let's see if i can kill a couple more
120 hertz baby
show me your magic
oh i think this is the end that's the end
16 415 there it is new high score
so then back to my original question if you're a first gen vr headset owner is
this a legitimate worthwhile upgrade well it's complicated there are a couple
of disadvantages still in my mind one of them being that i'm not a fan of the
bulkier more plasticky headset style i prefer the straps and two being the lack
of availability of accessories most notably the wireless accessory that's
available for the vive at this time it doesn't look like we're going to see
anything until 2020 or more likely 2021
based on the current wireless technology roadmap however
the advantages are very clear now we've
already got headsets with higher pixel density displays so i'm actually not
going to give it a ton of points for that but the upgrade in terms of the pixel
persistence the lack of screen door effect which if you remember does not
necessarily just come down to pixel count but also the sub pixel arrangement
and the increased refresh rate this thing will not only be a more pleasant
vr experience if my experience is anything to go on it
will actually make you a better vr gamer
pretty much all my games across the board i was beating scores that had held
for weeks or in some cases in the case of longbow in the lab it had actually
held for months i had just like a wicked run one day and i was never able to get
close again now twice in a row i actually beat it and beat it again but
it's still a thousand dollars now that's a tough one to answer because
from a sheer is it worth a thousand dollars um
standpoint i think it's hard to say that any gaming
experience is worth a thousand dollars depending on your life situation with
that said if you're investing in a vr gaming setup which already involves a
powerful gaming pc which is gonna cost you anywhere from a thousand to fifteen
hundred or even two thousand dollars is it worth the extra five hundred to
six hundred dollars over something from oculus or something from htc's current
lineup i would say that that is a clear yes
this is absolutely the king of gaming vr headsets right now
prove me wrong
speaking of uh king i'm the king of segways and this video
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