VR still has a lot of barriers to overcome cost and both the headset
itself and the PC required to run it are factors here the fact that you look like
a complete doof while you're flouncing
about in the middle of your living room is another one and for that matter here
we are in the VR space here at lonus Media Group you need a fair bit of space
in order to even use it but I think more
people could Overlook these restrictions if it wasn't for the clunky headsets and
the bulky surprisingly heavy easy to
tangle and movement restricting tethers
that tie them to their PC well as most of you know I'm not an
engineer so there's nothing I can really do about the headset itself but after a
particularly vigorous round of hollow point the other day I was inspired to
see if I could do something about the
cable and once again our friends at
Corning have come through so today will be trying at least trying anyway to
replace the entire bulky tether with this durable thin and light optical
cable cooler Masters masterc case maker 5 features their free form modular
system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in
the video description so first things first I got to gather up all the
supplies I need for what I'm calling
project light VR cable get it cuz it's
Optical and it's not as heavy so it starts with that Corning optical cable
that I mentioned before next we're going to need a gaming computer with support
for Thunderbolt so while I know the g751
from ASUS with its 980m graphics card is not technically VR ready this is a proof
of con not my daily driver rig so this will do just
nicely however because the HTC Vive and
the Occulus Rift for that matter do not have Thunderbolt inputs we're actually
going to need to split out our
Thunderbolt cable into all the necessary connectors on the other end so for that
I'll be using the Cal digigit TS2 or really I could use pretty much any
Thunderbolt dock but what this baby's going to do is give us two usb3 super
speed ports HDMI and audio exactly what
we need also I guess there's another USB port there where's my power adapter for
this
thing nothing's ever simple it's always a journey toing Mount Doom when we want
to make a video let's find a 5 amp 12vt
DC power well I thought the power adapter might be here where I used to
have that thing set up running to the server room it's not but I did discover
that I already had one of these optical cables so coring sent me an extra one I
guess forgot to move that 5V 4
amp see I'm pretty sure it's
like straight up non-compliant to not
have the voltage of an input
listed okay I found this kte 12vt 3 amp
thing that fits which I'm hoping is enough because this would be overspeed
to allow for a bunch of devices to be plugged into all the USB ports and
everything but speaking of power if we're not going to power the Vive
through the original tether one of those wires is a is a power cord and we're not
going to power it through the Thunderbolt cable which we're not
because optical cables do not carry power we're going to have to do
something which leads us to the last ingredients of our setup a small
backpack this was the smallest one we had lying around the office and I'm not
buying a backpack for this and for some reason I thought I needed
two so two battery Banks one of which
actually has an AC power outlet okay so
I lied that wasn't everything we needed but I found the things we need a short
USB 3 a TOA cable a short HDMI cable and
this is fun I remembered what the second power bank is for so that one's to
hopefully go DC to DC to power the
itself because it's got a
12v something amps we're not quite sure
uh max power input however both of our battery banks
are dead so we're going to charge these
up for the night and we'll get back at this tomorrow so we're back now when I
originally conceived this project I actually thought I was going to have to
cut off the tether and then resolder all the individual wires and like figure F
out which ones were carrying which signals and whatever and all that but
you know silly me I had no idea that the HTC
Vive I mean you can see why it took me a little while to sort this out the HTC VI
actually just has all the
inputs as plugs up at the
top there we go
just like that so two USBS one of which
I think has uh functionality TBD HDMI
power and 3 and 1/2 mm so
theoretically it's as simple as going from
here oh wow okay theoretically uh we've
already hit one stumbling block this doesn't physically
fit
um so theoretically it's as simple as going from here
into our Thunderbolt
Hub wow that is not a very long cable
H so we've got another challenge as well
between all the different adapters that come with our RAV Power extreme series
Power Bank only one of them is even kind
of close to fitting so we would either have to cut off and rece a compatible
adapter or we'll have to rely on using
the AC outlet one and a power squid or a
power brick in order to power both the
Vive as well as the Cal digit box
meaning that our battery life will be somewhat more limited 3 and 1 12 mm
audio cable should fit though at
least oh it's a right angle connector
nope even plugging my headphones in directly isn't going to work okay so
it's back to the drawing board somewhat here hopefully this is one of those
things where it gets Messier before it gets better let's go see if we can find
a low profile HDMI cable
oh never cut towards your fingers well
I'll give mono price this their HDMI cables are tough obviously I tried to
find a lower profile connector one first but failing that I well took the one we
had and threw it in the vice about 10
minutes of hacking away at it later and
it's uglier but it fits wow that is a
tight fit we might be back in Action here it was at that point that I
realized we didn't have Thunderbolt drivers the updated NVIDIA drivers or
the software for the HTC Vive installed so we took a short break while I got all
the software up to date so we have a small problem if I'm
plugged into the HDMI connection on the Cal digit box we're getting a compositor
not available error in Steam VR but if I plug directly
into the HDMI out on the computer we're good now there is still hope it's
possible that we can use the Thunderbolt daisy chain Port here to run HDMI over
DisplayPort into either directly into the headset or into the splitter box
that's included with the Vive but I'm really not sure if that's going to work
so stay tuned so we're going to try this
again going from
Thunderbolt to DVI to
HDMI okay let's try
again so just as a troubleshooting
step I'm going to go back to the HDMI
output right off the
computer and into this box so let's make sure that it works if
we do that so I've reached a very challenging
point in the troubleshooting I have just tried to connect it the vanilla
recommended way with the normal tether and running through the connector box
and it's still not working but get this when I take a standalone HDM my cable
and plug that directly into the computer
oh whatever take my word for it the headset comes up and it starts working
so I'm starting to think this might be a combination of issues where the
Thunderbolt implementation yeah there see there it is ready where the Thunderbolt implementation of this
laptop might use the onboard Graphics that is a very very likely situation
and my box might be
dead but as long as there is any potential for a problem to be solved by
simply throwing more Hardware at it I'm still in the game so I went home I got a
mini DisplayPort to HDMI I knew I had one of these turns out that's where it
was I got a different Thunderbolt two
dock I got the connector hub from my own
Vive and just for good
measure I brought my personal rig back
to the office because this one I know
for sure because there's a physical damn cable going from my GTX titanx to the
Thunderbolt card this one runs off of
the dedicated graphics let's
go I suddenly remember
why we moved to aluminum so it's update
time the Box isn't dead and the Vive is
running perfectly off of my
machine now let's try going back to Thunderbolt see no
okay wait a minute oh my God I don't
have the Thunderbolt see I'm flustered
now okay what's this interesting it says ready let's
restart in direct mode wow wouldn't it be amazing if it
was that simple I don't see anything
though that was very abrupt yep we
didn't know when we were shooting this video it was going to be a two-parter so
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