Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
NEWS
KALY – Kali-Extracts Announces New Hemp Extraction Contract Moving Closer To $20 Million Revenue Target
DALLAS, Texas, Aug. 30, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- Kali-Extracts, Inc. (Kali, Inc. dba/Kali-Extracts, Inc.) (USOTC: KALY) (“KALY”) today announced its 3rd contract to extract CBD from a hemp harvest utilizing KALY’s U.S. Patented Cannabis Extraction Process. KALY has previously announced hemp extraction contracts worth a potential $15 million in revenue. The contract today moves KALY closer to its $20 million in revenue target for its new hemp extraction line of business
You are correct
Keep in mind UPS and USPS are two different companys
Excellent idea my friend
This PR was yesterday fromPURA
PURA had prepared production capacity in Texas in anticipation of Texas passing the bill signed into law this week and expects to begin production in Texas by the end of the month of June.
You all know the time has come for Nouv
A buy out should be happened to Monglomerate families in the near future. IMO
100acers = 4,356,000 square feet
HUGHHHHhhhhhhhhhhh..........
100acers = 4,356,000 square feet
HUGHHHHhhhhhhh..................
News out
Ask Google for harvest hemp informations
I believe high Tech green house doesn’t need to wait until Spring to lay seeds.
It's should be year round harvest.
I agree
Bottom Turn
If you click on NOUV Pharma news and scroll down, u also see that STOP too
Correct me if I’m wrong
They’re going to build high tech green houses on 100 acres.
That’s mean all year round profits?
They don’t need to wait ‘til spring to lay seeds?
Wonder how many green houses on 1 acre?
How much profits for 1 green house?
They should post a PR for more details on these.
IMO
If the Government steps in to stop the CBD sales,
Pura never PR on March 7 regarding to M&A interest.
I recommend PURA should file a lawsuit against people who post false statements.
Hope they read my post.
If they want to expand their products to Europe. They have to go through E-commerce.
Ecommerce means Global.
They sold out bro.
10-q/a is out
OTCQB Overview
Overview
RequirementsCorporate ServicesApply
The OTCQB® Venture Market is for early-stage and developing U.S. and international companies that are not yet able to qualify for OTCQX. To be eligible, companies must be current in their reporting and undergo an annual verification and management certification process. Companies must meet $0.01 bid test and may not be in bankruptcy.
Company Benefits on OTCQB
Grouped with other companies that have audited financials available and are current in their reporting
Minimum bid price test of $0.01 removes companies that are most likely to be the subject of dilutive stock fraud schemes and promotion
Improved investor confidence through verified information, confirming that the Company Profile displayed on www.otcmarkets.com is current and complete
Annual management certification process to verify officers, directors, controlling shareholders, and shares outstanding
Trading on an established public market with Blue Sky recognition
Greater information availability for investors through the OTC Disclosure & News Service
Transparent prices for investors through full-depth of book with Real Time Level 2 quotes
Access to Morningstar quantitative equity ratings and research enables investors to better analyze and benchmark a company relative to its sector
Trade Through OTC Link® ATS – The System of Choice
OTC Link® ATS is an SEC registered Alternative Trading System for broker-dealer subscribers to provide investors with an efficient and effective electronic trading experience. OTC Link® ATS directly links a diverse network of leading U.S. broker-dealers that provide liquidity and execution services for a wide spectrum of U.S. and global securities. Its real-time price transparency and connectivity offers broker-dealers control of trades and choice of counterparties so that they can efficiently provide best execution, attract order flow, and comply with FINRA and SEC regulations.
The New York Times calls this "The Next Gold Rush."
Marijuana$$$$
Thank you doebop.
More news
"Last year, the Company introduced the pilot sales of some new sports and fitness nutritional supplements as part of our ongoing strategy to develop the AmeriCanna Cafe and a line of AmeriCanna Cafe cannabis infused products," said Steven Rash, CEO of North American Cannabis Holdings. "As the word 'pilot' suggests, the sales of the nutritional supplements was a test. The test went better than anticipated and substantially boosted our overall sales revenue in our fiscal Q2. We are fortunate to have hit a new product line right out of the gate and not otherwise had to endure cycling through trial and error to get it right. At this point, we expect the increased sales to continue and we are now working to expand the sales program."
News out
North American Cannabis Holdings Sales Continue To Grow
Accesswire AccesswireMay 2, 2017
DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / May 2, 2017 / North American Cannabis Holdings, Inc. (OTC PINK: USMJ) today announced that the pilot sales of new sports and fitness nutritional supplements that resulted in the Company's reported 40% revenue growth and 53% gross margin growth in Q2 continued into Q3 are expected to remain consistent in Q4. Management anticipates the upcoming Q3 financial report to reflect the continued pilot product sales.
In Cuba or in the lost Atlantic.
The PlayStation VR will launch on October 13 at $400, but there’s a catch
Digital Trends
Matt Smith Mon, Jun 13 7:05 PM PDT
Update 6:50 PM 6/13/16: Sony announced at its 2016 E3 press event that the Playstation VR would release on October 13th, clarifying its original October ship date.
Gamers waiting eagerly to know if the PlayStation VR will be cheaper than Oculus’ Rift or HTC’s Vive need wait no longer. PlayStation has announced its entry into the virtual reality arena will be priced at $400, and it will land in October (exact date to be announced).
But wait, there’s more — as in, you’ll have to buy more. Sony has stated that the PlayStation 4 camera will be needed to use the headset at all, and PlayStation Move controllers will be needed for many games. The camera goes for $60, and the Move controllers are $50 at most retailers.
Related Offer: PlayStation VR at Gamestop | Playstation VR at Best Buy
That puts the all-in cost just over $500. Add in the PlayStation 4 itself, and you’re looking at around $800 to $850, depending on how miserly you were.
Once again, VR has proven a bit more expensive than hoped. Still, Sony easily beats its prime competitors in the pricing war. Oculus’ Rift is $600 for the headset, which does not include a motion controller. HTC’s Vive is $800, but does come with a pair of motion controllers.
So, what do you get with the PlayStation VR? The box include HDMI and USB cables, stereo headphones with earpieces, a power brick with cord, and the add-on processor box that handles the additional processor load demanded by the headset’s sensors.
Related: Oculus Rift vs. PlayStation VR – Spec Comparison
The Playstation VR will launch with a bundle that includes the motion controllers and camera, as well as a small selection of bundled games. The Rift and Vive will both launch with a few free games, and select PC builders are offering Rift bundles. Dell, for example, will knock $200 off its XPS 8900 desktop if you buy it with a Rift.
The PlayStation VR headset itself has a 5.7-inch, 120Hz OLED display with a 100-degree field of view and 1080p resolution. The headset also has sensors that detect where the user is looking with as little as 18 milliseconds of lag.
While the PlayStation VR’s all-in price is still daunting, it has a serious edge over its competitors, the Rift and Vive. Both required a PC that’ll cost $1,000 or more, if purchased from a manufacturer. The all-in price of a PC based headset can climb close to $2,000. Sony hopes that it’ll be seen as a more approach and affordable option.
The company also wants to attract gamers with its library. Fifty titles are promised between October and the end of 2016. That includes an Assassin’s Creed tie-in, popular Rift demo Eve: Valkyrie, and Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, a strange mix of roller-coaster and horror show. Aside from games, Sony also plans to enable the usual array of VR content, such as 360-degree videos and a “cinematic mode” that will allow play of regular titles and videos within a VR theater.
Pre-orders are now open for the $400 PlayStation VR Core Bundle
Sony’s PlayStation VR bundles are selling like hotcakes
Valve has plans to lower VR system requirements
I've read an article last week that Apple's trying to take over Spectra7. I afraid to post it, because I don't want to get sue.
How could it be Brian if you live in the West Coast
Do not email him. Call and leave a message, that'swhat I did. Good luck
Thank you Harley.
BK phone # (260)490-9990
Email: bkis123@aol.com
I believe when I see with my own eyes. We have no choice to base on what he was telling us (shareholders). I'm hoping spring next year is our year to celebrate, let cross our fingers.
Thank you for your comment, you're the only one said thank you to me.
GLT you too.
I talked to BK last Thursday 05-12
Update on the shingles; any good news so far?
Well, the fact of the matter is that everything is continuing to process. We just recently met with an engineering and fabrication company that has agreed to take on our project. So that's really anything that's new... Will take in the project and help us engineer the thing and really put some specifications to what we need to do. We're moving forward.
So you think it should be ready sometime this year?
That's really hard to say. What we're doing is we're actually building a small, I'm going to call it a prototype, that can be scaled. Scaled up to larger... Cause we need to make sure we got all the bugs worked out before we really jump into it full force. But, I don't think we're going to be generating any revenue or anything this year yet. We're already in the middle of May, but I think we'll have some real testing and real results, real progress, by the end of this year. We can really look forward to what next year will hold for us. The one thing about it, is as long as I'm still breathing, we have a chance of this finally working. Because I'm not going to quit; it's not a very easy process and I don't have a lot of money to throw at this, so I've got be very careful. Fortunately we've got that grant that venture group in Indiana, or the state of Indiana, and that's what's paying for that piece of it. We're continuing the march and I know we have something special; I wish I had a million dollars that I could throw at right now, because we've made a lot of mistakes and we've, you know, had a bunch of false starts. But I think we're finally ready to get moving now if we had the real capital. I think that's coming.
Anything else that came up besides the shingles?
No. Frankly, just about everything else is launch TV, that stocks not going to go anywhere. We just couldn't make any money. That turned out to be a, you know, just a bad deal for everybody. We still have ownership, interest, and security in the company, CSA. We're just waiting for that to continue to develop. I'm still pretty confident that that's going to turn out to be ok too. I don't think that it's anything that's going to be anytime soon.
Thank you, Mick
Hello Mick.
Go to this website www.stockhouse.com and read through all last week posts, you'll find out how many S7 ins.
Big news Jimmer$$$$. More on the way.
Big pop by the end of this year?
The Ars VR headset showdown—Oculus Rift vs. HTC Vive
Our tale of the tape comparison makes a first-generation recommendation.
by Kyle Orland - Apr 11, 2016 5:00am PDT
Login to bookmark
205
Just wait...
As impressed as we are with the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, we’d still recommend you wait on a VR headset unless you have a rabid interest in VR. As the first generation of a largely unproven technology, both headsets have some major problems that need to be ironed out before they can appeal beyond early adopters.
For the Rift, the lack of hand-tracking is a major strike. It’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend a VR platform that currently can’t run killer apps like Audioshield, Job Simulator, Hover Junkers, Tilt Brush, and many others that use your hands to create an entirely new experience. The Touch controllers will eventually help Oculus on this score, but right now their quality and functionality (not to mention their release date and price) are big question marks. Add in the current issues with the Oculus platform itself, and there are clear reasons to wait at this early date.
Advertisement
For the Vive, the clunky, downright uncomfortable design of the headset itself is a major issue. Being uncomfortable makes it hard to get lost in a VR experience for hours at a time. Like it or not, Oculus’ commitment to securing exclusive games could also cause some regret for Vive owners, even if none of the Oculus exclusives currently feel like must-have system sellers that we simply couldn’t live without.
Box designed by Apple in California (not really, but come on...).
To further complicate this decision, there’s PlayStation VR, a major competitor launching in October. If you don’t already have a powerful gaming PC, PSVR’s roughly $850 “all-in” price (which includes a PS4) will be hundreds of dollars cheaper than either the Rift or the Vive (if you’re already locked in on the idea of virtual reality on the PC, just ignore this paragraph). Sony’s platform will have its own hand-tracking controllers, its own set of exclusive games, and the support of developers big and small that Sony has been courting for years. We’ve been very impressed with Sony’s VR solution in multiple trade show demos over the years, and it’s hard to recommend jumping into the VR format wars before one major competitor is even available.
Right now, there are too many questions about how the VR platform wars will shake out to be fully comfortable locking in to any one system. You don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on what amounts to the Betamax of VR. Even if neither headset is a complete market failure, it's hard to know at this early date which one will attract the best exclusive software going forward.
More than that, both headsets are clearly first-generation products that will likely be surpassed by cheaper, higher-quality models relatively soon (and the underlying PC required to power these headsets will only get cheaper). Oculus told Ars in 2014 that the second consumer version of the Rift would be coming a year or two after the first. More recently, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said the hardware refresh cycle would be "somewhere between a phone and console.” Updated SteamVR headsets are no doubt in the pipeline as well from HTC or other manufacturers.
Investing in either the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift today is like buying a first-generation iPhone in the summer of 2007. On the plus side, you got to enjoy the iPhone and its many advancements over previous feature phones well before anyone else. On the downside, you had to buy the iPhone 3G a year later if you wanted features as basic as GPS and, um, the App Store (and you were locked out of the Android ecosystem). Who knows what we’ll see as lacking on these expensive first-generation headsets a year or two from today.
Put a virtual gun to our heads
The massive retail box is a hybrid between a glossy and matte black finish.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably eager enough about VR to ignore our “just wait” advice (though remember, deliveries are currently backordered for months). If forced to pick one today, we’d have to go with the Vive. Comfort issues aside, the Vive’s handheld controllers just open up too many compelling and unique experiences that aren’t possible on the Rift. Plus, sit-down, traditional controller-style games available on the Rift can usually be enjoyed perfectly well on the Vive (even if specific exclusive games are and will be stuck on Oculus’ platform).
Yes, Oculus will have its own hand-tracking controllers relatively soon, but if you’re ignoring our advice and buying now, you obviously want the most interesting and all-encompassing VR experience available today. That’s what the Vive and its crucial controllers provide. It’s also worth remembering that those Oculus Touch controllers (and the extra tracking camera packaged with them) could easily cost $100 or more on their own, cutting into the Rift’s current $200 price advantage over the Vive.
If we could combine the Vive's platform and controller scheme with the paid-for exclusives and headset design of the Rift, we might have the perfect virtual reality headset for 2016. But as it stands, the Vive's positives outweigh its negatives slightly more than the Rift's.
The Ars VR headset showdown—Oculus Rift vs. HTC Vive
Our tale of the tape comparison makes a first-generation recommendation.
by Kyle Orland - Apr 11, 2016 5:00am PDT
Login to bookmark
205
How do you want to play?
Beyond the headset and platform differences, though, the biggest thing separating the Rift and the Vive is the packaged controllers. The Vive comes with two fully trackable controllers that effectively let you see your hands in front of you as you look around in VR. The Rift, on the other hand, comes with a standard Xbox One controller that is similar to the dual-stick controls you’ve used for decades (plus a handheld remote that’s useful mainly for scanning through videos).
There’s nothing stopping either headset from working with other controllers (though the Vive’s hand-tracking controllers won’t work natively with the Rift’s tracking camera). In fact, Oculus will be coming out with its own hand-tracking Touch controllers later this year, and many Vive games already support a standard controller or the traditional keyboard and mouse. Third-party controllers like racing wheels or wireless body trackers will work just fine with supported software.
It's not much to look at, but trust us, it's the most accurate and usable motion controller released to date.
All that said, the packaged controllers have an outsized influence on the kinds of games and experiences available for each headset. As such, Rift games tend to be designed to be played seated in one place, looking at things happening around you rather than touching them directly. There are lots of games that take place in vehicle cockpits, and many take place from a third-person, god’s eye view of the action below. In first-person, you often awkwardly look at an object and push a button to interact with it, which just feels weird in the immersive world of VR.
Advertisement
The majority of high-profile Vive experiences are instead designed to be played by simply picking up and holding the virtual objects around you. The controller in your hand can become a gun, a sword, a tennis racket, a magical paintbrush, or countless other natural tools, which you use largely as you would in real life. The intuitive interface this provides is really unlike any game or computing controller we’ve ever seen before.
Many Vive games also encourage or require you to walk around the room, jump in the air, or duck down on the ground to dodge incoming fire, pick up something out of reach, or simply traverse the in-game space. If you have the room to enjoy it, these "room-scale" experiences are a nice added feature for many Vive games. If you don’t, most games can technically work just standing (or sometimes sitting) in place.
Again, Oculus plans to launch its Touch controllers later this year. That will give the Rift similar hand-tracking capabilities (and technically enable room-scale experiences through a second tracking camera, though Oculus hasn’t done much to encourage this idea). Still, the fact that those controllers aren’t launching as an integrated part of the Rift hardware tells you a lot about Oculus’ priorities. On the Rift, hand-tracking seems destined to be at least something of a market-splitting add-on, a niche within the VR niche that may draw more limited support from native developers (and multi-platform porters) than the Vive’s integrated hand-tracking.
This is not a small difference. The vision-filling, all-encompassing virtual reality on both the Rift and the Vive creates convincing worlds that beg for you to reach out and play with them. But right now, that is really only possible on one of the major headsets.
Exclusively confusing
Of the notable games in the Rift's 30-strong launch library, the high-octane online space shooter Eve Valkyrie comes closest to a killer app. Tracking the enemy with your head at 360 degrees is a game-changer in the truest sense of the word.
Since the Rift and the Vive are both essentially add-on monitors for a Windows PC, you might think any generic game made for virtual reality would just work on either headset. In practice, things are a bit more complicated.
What natural cross-compatibility does exist between the Rift and the Vive is strictly a one-way street. If you have a Rift plugged into the computer, SteamVR will detect that and can easily launch most VR-compatible games onto the competing headset (you can’t easily launch the SteamVR menu or 2D Steam games on the Rift, though). The same is not true of the Oculus Store. Games purchased on that platform won’t run on the Vive; they won't launch at all if the Rift isn’t plugged in and detected.
For some games this lack of cross-platform support from Oculus to SteamVR isn’t a big deal. Titles like Elite Dangerous, Project Cars, Radial-G, Time Machine VR, and many others are all available in indistinguishable forms on both the Oculus and Steam stores. Some other currently Rift-exclusive titles, such as Eve Valkyrie and Adr1ft, already have SteamVR/HTC Vive ports planned for the near future. Yet others should be relatively easy to port to the Vive if the developers desire.
Then there are the games that will remain exclusive to Oculus’ platform because Oculus helped fund their development. Launch titles like Lucky’s Tale, Chronos, Into the Dead, and Hero Bound: Spirit Champion will always be playable only through the Oculus Store and the Rift. Back at E3 2015, Oculus said there were two dozen such Rift exclusive games in the works, a list that now includes upcoming titles like Insomniac-developed third-person adventure Edge of Nowhere, first-person shooter Damaged Core, mountain traversal simulator The Climb, card-based RPG Dragon Front, and rhythm game Rock Band VR.
On the other side, many of the most compelling Vive titles are functionally exclusives for the time being thanks to their reliance on hand-tracking controls (and, sometimes, on room-scale traversal). This includes almost all of the Vive’s killer apps; even though these games can technically run on the Rift, it’s currently impossible to interact with them on the headset. It’s currently unclear whether the pending Oculus Touch controllers will be able to replace Vive controllers universally or whether games will need to be ported to the new control standard.
So far, we have to give the Vive the edge in this battle of the exclusives. The ability to reach into the environment with your hands and hold in-game objects is unique enough to make most Vive-exclusive games feel fresh, while none of the Rift’s exclusives really feel like can’t-miss killer apps at this point. More generally, however, the Rift’s library feels like a better-curated selection of complete, fully developed games. Many current titles made for the Vive feel like short “first episode” tastes of larger games, early access titles still in need of a little polish, or short prototype experiments without much in the way of depth.
Just some of the Vive experiences that currently can't happen on the Rift.
The Ars VR headset showdown—Oculus Rift vs. HTC Vive
Our tale of the tape comparison makes a first-generation recommendation.
by Kyle Orland - Apr 11, 2016 5:00am PDT
Login to bookmark
205
Two headsets enter, one leaves with our current recommendation.
Kyle Orland
In our original reviews of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, we tried very hard to examine these virtual reality systems on their own merits without constant comparisons to the competition. But no product exists in a vacuum. After years of buildup, we’re now faced with two competitive, PC-tethered VR headsets hitting the market right next to each other. Unless you have a spare $1,400 to spend to buy both headsets (or more if you need to outfit a gaming PC, too), you’ll have to pick one or the other if you want virtual reality in your home as soon as possible.
Advertisement
Today, we’ll lay out the major pros and cons of both Oculus and HTC’s VR systems as we see them in order to (hopefully) guide you to the headset that’s right for you. If you’re just planning on scrolling to the bottom for our final verdict, though, here’s a spoiler—we’re not entirely sure you should buy either one just yet.
HEADSET SPECS
OCULUS RIFT HTC VIVE
HEADSET WEIGHT 470 grams (~1 lbs) 555 grams (~1.2 lbs) without cables
DISPLAY 2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye) OLED panels 2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye) AMOLED panels
REFRESH RATE 90 Hz 90 Hz
FIELD OF VIEW 110 degrees 110 degrees
LENS SPACING 58-72mm (adjustable) 60.2-74.5mm (adjustable)
PACKAGED CONTROLLERS Xbox One gamepad and Oculus Remote Two wireless motion-tracked controllers with rechargeable 960mAh batteries
TRACKING 3-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, and external "Constellation" IR camera tracking system SteamVR 1.0 tracking system with two "Lighthouse" IR laser tracking boxes (up to 5m diagonal tracking volume)
AUDIO Integrated over-ear headphones with 3D directional audio support and built-in microphone Audio extension dongle to plug generic headphones to headset. Built-in microphone
PC CONNECTION 4m custom cable (integrates HDMI and USB connections) Three-part multi-cable (HDMI, USB, and power) with junction box for PC connection.
INCLUDED GAMES Lucky's Tale (and Eve Valkyrie with pre-order) Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption, and Tilt Brush
PRICE $600 $800
RECOMMENDED PC SPECS
OCULUS RIFT HTC VIVE
GPU NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
CPU Intel i5-4590 / AMD FX 8350 equivalent or greater
RAM 8GB 4GB
OS Windows 7 SP1 or newer Windows 7 SP1 or newer
INPUTS 3 USB 3.0 ports (for headset, tracking camera, wireless controller dongle), one HDMI 1.3 port 1x HDMI 1.4 or DisplayPort 1.2; 1x USB 2.0
OTHER At least 1.5m x 2m of open space for "room-scale" experiences.
Visual similarities
On a pure baseline of technical specs, there’s remarkably little difference in the Rift and Vive. Both sport two 1080x1200 pixel OLED displays (one for each eye) that provide an utterly convincing 3D effect. Both headsets have 90 Hz refresh rates, low-persistence pixel switching, and accurate, low latency head-tracking that quickly updates your apparent VR view as you move and tilt your head in space.
You can still pick out the pixels and a slight “screen door effect” between those pixels if you really try. Staring at the panels at close range means each individual pixel appears a little blurrier and fuzzier than it might on a hi-res monitor or TV, but those problems are practically identical on the Rift and the Vive. At this point, it’s hard to say one looks noticeably better than the other for the same software.
Both the Rift and the Vive let you adjust the interpupillary distance enough to allow easy focus for a wide range of face shapes. Both officially sport a 110-degree field of view, enough to fill most of your vision while still leaving noticeable black bars on the edge of your periphery. (While there are some claims that one headset or the other has a bigger functional field of view in practice, we can’t notice a difference.)
If we were to go looking for visual differences, we could argue that the Rift’s lenses suffer a bit more from the crepuscular “god ray” effect, which causes some apparent lens flare when bright pixels are displayed on a dark background. You could also say that the Vive’s image sometimes looks blurrier at the periphery if you move your eyes off center.
Neither puts much of a thumb on the balance between the two, though. The Rift and the Vive each provide a highly convincing, nearly indistinguishable visual sense of virtual reality. These systems meet the minimum baseline for an enjoyable sense of presence.
Get comfortable
If there’s one area where the Rift unquestionably bests the Vive, it’s in the design of the physical headset. I was comfortable wearing the Rift for hours at a time without breaks and without any desire to take it off. With the Vive, on the other hand, I found myself needing to take frequent breaks and constantly fiddle with the fit to get comfortable.
Not only is the Rift 80 grams lighter than the Vive (about 15 percent), but that lighter weight is balanced much better on the head. This is primarily thanks to the Rift’s pair of rigid arms, which extend from the side of the headset past the ears, coming together in a firm triangle that fits snugly under the back of the skull.
These arms sit on a pivot, which lets you tilt the headset easily up and down on your face for comfort (and focus adjustment). The arms also sit inside a sheath that gives them about an inch of springy give. This makes the headset relatively easy to take off and put on like a baseball cap, even with one hand (though users with glasses may run into some trouble).
By contrast, the Vive uses thick, hard-to-adjust vinyl velcro straps that never feel totally secure on my head no matter how much I adjust things. This design means you have to clamp the Vive to your face like a pair of ski goggles, pushing the heavy headset directly into some sensitive parts of the face with nothing but a layer of soft foam padding separating you from the hard plastic. That’s noticeably tougher than the Rift, which almost floats on top of your nose thanks to plastic and vinyl spacers and solid, supportive foam around the eyes.
Besides the constant pressure on the sinuses, the Vive’s design also forms a tight seal around the eyes, trapping heat and locking out air. This can lead to a lot of unnecessary sweat and noticeable facial redness after prolonged use. The Rift's design is much more airy and breathable in this regard.
The Rift has a few other design touches that just make it more enjoyable to wear, such as squishy, over-the-ear headphones that flip right down into place from their (removable) mounts on the support arms. The Vive, on the other hand, has a headphone extension cable that dangles annoyingly from the top of your head, and it comes with short-corded earbuds that have a tendency to get tangled and pulled out of your ears while playing.
The Rift’s single, light tethering wire flows smoothly behind the left ear and down the computer, while the Vive’s coiling, three-part cord sits heavily over the center of the head and back behind the base of the skull. And the Rift has a handy built-in sensor that automatically turns the headset off when you take it off. When it comes to comfort, it’s not even a contest.
A quick look at some of the clever design features that make the Rift so comfortable. Video edited by Jennifer Hahn.
Platform wars
If headset design is the Rift’s biggest triumph over the Vive, the underlying software platform is the Vive’s biggest triumph over the Rift. The Oculus Store and Library management tools work OK, but they’re horribly bare bones compared to the fuller features of SteamVR.
On the Vive, you can see your friends’ activity and chat with them from inside the headset over audio or text (through an awkward hunt-and-peck VR keyboard). On the Rift, friends lists seem almost ornamental; there are no real ways to interact with online buddies from the menu. We also had trouble getting voice chat to work in Rift games that ostensibly supported the feature.
On the Vive, you can bring up a quick view of the Windows desktop from the SteamVR menu at any time, and soon you’ll be able to connect a Bluetooth smartphone to pass text messages, phone calls, and calendar alerts to VR. The Rift doesn’t support either of these multitasking-friendly features.
On the Vive, you can also play 2D Steam games in a vision-filling “theater mode,” download one game while playing another, and download new 3D backgrounds for your default VR menu. None of these features is yet available on the Rift.
The twilit view that greets you when you first put on the Vive.
Then there’s the Vive’s handy front-facing camera, which can give users a quick view of the outside world (either as squiggly outlines or a small full-color live video) without the need to take off the headset.
Oculus may well add many of these features through downloadable platform updates in the near future (though the camera and Bluetooth connection seem like secure Vive advantages). For now, though, the Vive enjoys a significant advantage in terms of its software platform.
PAGE: 1 2 3 NEXT ?