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
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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.
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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.
