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Vive review – one week on

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Well, I have had my Vive for one full week so far, and it is still extremely fun to play on.  I was hoping to have my Oculus so that I could do a comparison of both headsets, but as of right now, I have no info on when it’ll arrive, aside from the ‘estimated shipping’ being between today and May 12th.

Roomscale – This is a game changer, at least for people with enough space.  It needs a 1.5×2 meter space to move around in.  I have had the good fortune to have a 2×2 meter area to play in so I actually exceed the minimum area a bit.  Being able to move around to interact with the environment adds a lot to the immersion.  On the other hand, roomscale needs, well a decently large empty room to move around in.

Motion controllers – The Vive wands are very interesting devices, very reminiscent of the Wiimotes from the Nintendo Wii.  The Vive wands are a little larger than a wiimote, thanks to the circular tracking part at the top of the controller.  This part is what allows the wand to track properly.  The accuracy is amazing, part of me wants to see if I could juggle them in VR, though I really don’t want to break one of them…  They have large touchpads that can be used in different ways by various games, they also double as buttons, there is also a ‘menu’ button directly above the touchpad and the system button is directly below the touchpad.  On the back side of the controller is the trigger and grip buttons.  Overall these controllers work very well, though it’d be nice if they had larger batteries or replaceable batteries.  They haven’t died on me in game yet, but they do show that they’re running low on power fairly quickly.

Base stations – You set these up outside of the outer corners of your roomscale area.  If you don’t need roomscale, you can get buy with just one, but it is highly recommended to have both for proper tracking.  It can be annoying having the headset drop to a gray screen if tracking is lost by, say looking away from the base station.  People on Reddit have been complaining about the base stations being loud, in my experience they are quieter than the fans on my computer, so mine are very quiet.  Ambient sounds easily drown out any noise made by the base station motors.  The large amount of space that they allow for tracking is awesome, though there can be dead zones depending on where you mount them.

The headset itself – It looks like something straight out of a Sci-Fi movie, and works awesomly.  I have seen people complaining about the screen door effect and ‘God Rays’, so far the SDE is there, but it’s far better than it was on the Oculus DK1 or DK2.  You will only see SDE if you look for it, when playing games I usually don’t notice SDE issues.  On the issue of God Rays, I only really see any of those when there is something overly bright against a dark/black background.  Usually game scenes won’t have that much contrast in their environments, so the god ray issue isn’t really all that bad.

In the end, I’m extremely happy with the Vive and the games that are currently available for it.  I’m looking forward to what’ll be coming in the future.  The Vive is a taste of what’s to come in my opinion, things can only get better from here.  Now I wait to see what the Rift will be like…

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The Microsoft Surface Pro 3

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The Microsoft Surface Pro 3

I recently got a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, a very nice tablet computer.  The interesting thing about this tablet is the fact that unlike my Android tablets, or iPad, this is a full computer, able to run desktop applications. (Even Ubuntu Linux can be loaded on the blasted thing!)

Part of the reason I wanted to get a Surface is the fact that I’d like to resume working on my webcomic, Age of the Elements, and as far as I can tell, this device is similar to some Wacom tablets.  The pen works very well, I had heard that the surface used Wacom tech for the pen, but that was only in the original and Surface 2 tablets.  The Surface Pro 3 uses a NTrig pen instead.  At first I was skeptical, the pen requires a AAA battery to work, unlike Wacom pens, and it has a lot fewer configuration options than my older graphics tablets (Wacom Intuos and Bamboo Fun)  which can be troublesome.

So far I’ve used Photoshop Elements 7, GIMP, and the Krita image editors on the device, all of them work well, though GIMP has a bug that makes the image update extremely slowly, though that was fixed by downgrading some of GIMPs .dll files.  They should really fix that soon…  So far I’ve taken a liking to Krita, though it has a mildly annoying issue where it will scroll up or down randomly when drawing (Probably a configuration issue I believe…)  All of these applications detect the Stylus properly and have full pressure sensitivity, which can be tweaked via the ‘Surface’ App, or in the art applications themselves.  It is very nice not needing to carry any extra equipment around when I feel like drawing, I just need to take this out and start.

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Surface Pro 3 with a Black Type keyboard

The type keyboard is surprisingly nice.  Not as nice as a good mechanical keyboard, but given how thin the keyboard is, it is a pleasure to type with.  It disconnects from the device fairly easily, but won’t just fall off, as the magnet that holds it in place is very powerful.  The on-screen keyboard is also nice, but nothing to write home about.  It works about the same as the on-screen keyboards that my Android devices and iPad have.

I can see why Microsoft designed Windows 8 the way they did, Windows 8 Apps work very well, I haven’t installed any start-menu replacements, as those would actually make life more difficult than the standard w8 menu.  They really should have done more work to the desktop interface though, as some parts are too small to use easily without the stylus, or a mouse.

The kickstand is also a interesting part of the device, it can go to a very low angle which is useful for drawing, and the keyboard makes it difficult to push around when flipped under the device which is very nice while drawing.

Well those are my experiences With the Surface Pro 3 so far, I’m going to keep on using it, it has some faults, but it’s good enough for me to use it in place of my standard laptops in most situations.

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