Vive Wireless Adaptor

[BrynS]

This article popped up on one of my feeds recently noting that the Vive and Vive Pro wireless adaptors should be available next month from various outlets including OcUk.

Just wondering if you guys are planning to sell additional batteries for the setup and when the preorders will be going up?

 

[BrynS]

I know what mean about the cost, but at this stage I've invested quite a bit in to my Vive, DAS and a bunch of other accessories that the cost for wireless use seems quite reasonable.

I've recently expanded my VR space from about 2.5m squared to 3.5m X 4.5m and use one of those Midwec ceiling suspension pulley systems and still find the cable pretty restrictive when I use the headset.

Was thinking about going for a TPcast last year but after the official one was announced I was happy to wait for that. Battery life on the official adaptor is only up 2.5 hours though so a spare battery seems needed.

 

[BrynS]

... https://dm.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/996mmm/vive_wireless_adapter_battery/

Should help you out.

Thanks for the link.

I guess we kind of expected it but £300 is a ridiculous amount of money for a battery pack and wireless AV Tranceiver. Especially when the current headset has been out a few years and will likely be replaced soon with a new model which may well include the wireless functionality. The price tag is so high you're basically halfway towards buying the next gen headset if you forego it. I suspect this is more about HTC trialling the technology before including it in their next product range rather than something they actually expect anyone to buy.

There's probably an element of using this as testbed on the current gen to look at adoption rates and develop the technology further to hopefully include it as a baseline feature in the next gen. I think most agree that Vive Pro is not a true 2.0 product but more of an intermediate 1.5 upgrade in some areas. The Pimax promises much yet seems to continually miss deadlines and the developers often row back on claimed performance or capabilities. Hopefully it will deliver soon as this will only encourage further VR development. So even though the Vive was launched in April 2016 I reckon it will be around for a while yet even if a true next gen from Oculus, HTC or others is launched next year.

Another thing to keep in mind is that bolting on wireless functionality to these VR headsets is not a trivial addon. There is a considerable amount of data that needs to be processed wirelessly within some pretty tight latency tolerances. Whilst the bulk of that is the visual data, the transceiver is linking all the controller data and audio back to the PC in realtime and the battery is powering not just the wireless transceiver but the headset as well. Not to sound like an HTC apologist (I had an absolutely dire experience initially ordering and then returning my Vive from HTC last year), however I think the platform will still be relevant for a while to come and I feel the wireless adaptor is a fair investment overall for untethered VR for £300. Obviously if the cost was reduced there should be wider take up!

^^ As said above.

I'm contemplating entering the VIVE eco-system but the fact this wireless add-on also seem specific for the VIVE (there is a different one for the VIVE Pro) makes me feel like this isn't backwards compatible. Therefore when the VIVE 2 does come out, it will likely be useless. With that worry, I feel like putting up with a wire might be better than throwing away £300...

It's basically the same adaptor on both platforms, but the Vive Pro replaces the 3-in-1 cable with a single cable (there may also need to be some DP-HDMI conversion on the Vive Pro wireless adaptor or PCI-E card which may add to the cost versus the standard Vive wireless adaptor). I agree that the pricing should be similar assuming no extra hardware is needed on the Vive Pro adaptor.

It one of those value judgements you can only really make after having experience of using a particular product with a range of games/software in a room-scale environment and only then factoring in the impact of being untethered. As mentioned before, with a reasonable VR area and a cable pulley system on the ceiling I'm still conscious of the cable most of the time and often feel rooted in place or limited to a particular orientation because I can feel the cable twisting when changing direction.

 

[BrynS]

I don't think you can base anything about future headsets and their compatibility with current tech from the Vive and Vive Pro. The Vive Pro is just a minor upgrade to the Vive. Better looks and more comfortable with a small bump in resolution, but same basic underpinnings.

What I would be hoping for is that the wireless adapter won't be compatible with the next Vive headset as that means we haven't progressed much at all.

Indeed, I think you hit the nail on the head here.

Hi mate, can you give me some hints on a cable suspension system, I'm going to try and get one going in my room.

The whole VIVE eco-system just really worries me in regards to how future proof it is. I'm not dropping £300 on a wireless adapator for it to be useless in Gen 2.

To echo what melmac noted, the VR market is still in quite a disruptive phase with a number of new players entering the market (StarVR, Pimax, etc) and converging push and pull pressures from mobile VR and mixed reality. While a lot of the VR systems share the same types of underlying technology, manufacturers are still pushing proprietary elements (VR title exclusives, their own storefronts, different tracking systems, etc). The current VR market reminds me a bit of the early 3dfx Voodoo 1 and 2 period in the late 90s where there were loads of companies working on 3D accelerators of varying capabilities (S3, Matrox, Rendition, Intel, ATi, Nvidia, 3DLabs, PowerVR and so on) and different APIs such as GLide/OpenGL/DirectX. It was only really a couple of years later in the early 2000s when ATi and Nvidia emerged as the two dominant players by buying out the remainder or driving them out of the market or into niche areas that the market settled on a dominant API (DirectX) and OpenGL to some extent. 3D graphics and gaming saw an extended period of substantial performance and feature updates with each new generation from that point as two pretty evenly matched competitors drove the industry forward and encouraged the adoption of standardised interfaces: VGA -> DVI -> HDMI/DP ->.

To be honest, it's probably unreasonable at this stage to be opting for a particular VR system and expecting an upgrade path where you can re-use certain components and this applies to all current eco-systems. I'm certainly not expecting to be able to reuse the Vive Wireless adaptor with whatever next-gen VR headset I upgrade to a in few years. VR is still a pretty niche market. However, of the current VR systems I'd suggest the Vive is more open to accessories/upgrade/modification than most, e.g. the Vive Pro being able to reuse the Lighthouse 1.0 system, 1.0 wands. The general expectation is that the Valve Knuckles should also work with the Vive and so on. Hopefully there is more standardisation on the horizon with VirtualLink.

As for a cable suspension system I can't link the one I use here but if you google "VR Cable Management System" the generic 6x cable pulley type system with ceiling mounts will crop up. There's a few manufacturers offering very similar systems. Expect to pay £20-25.