As I’m sure most of you have heard by now, HTC has recently announced their entry into the VR world with a headset that was developed in collaboration with Valve, called the Vive. The developer edition will be out later this spring and will only be available to select devs, but these guys are moving quick and have set the consumer edition as being available to purchase later this year. The company demoed the device initially at the 2015 GDC and attendees who had a chance to test the technology seemed more than a little impressed; with the general consensus being that this new headset puts everything we have seen to date to shame! How that will translate over to the VR porn experience has yet to be tested, but you can bet it’s gonna be good!
According to HTC, the Vive Developer Edition achieves “photorealistic imagery” and uses two 1200 x 1080 displays with a 90 frames per second refresh rate, effectively eliminating jitter and making the so-far-all-to-prevalent-in-vr immersion smashing simulator sickness a thing of the past. Early user experience reports suggest a smooth experience with little to no SDE (screen door effect), and claims that VR presence is now frequently achieved. Translation: T& A will look beautiful and you won’t need to barf!
Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the Vive will allow the user to get up and explore virtual space, walk around and inspect objects from every angle. Similar to the Oculus Rift the HTC device tracks your head’s movements using a host of various sensors (70 in total) including an accelerometer and a gyroscope, but it is the addition of laser position sensors instead of the Oculus optical tracking approach which really sets things apart (at least as far as the headset itself is concerned, we’ll talk a little bit more about the other big thing in a moment), making the Vive the first such device to offer a ‘full room scale’ experience as opposed to the Oculus “seated” experience Palmer and the gang have been touting for some time now.
With one-tenth of a degree of accuracy and coupled with Steam’s VR base station, the system is capable of tracking your physical location in spaces as large as 15’ by 15’; and while this obviously won’t do much for static material like VirtualRealPorn.com videos (yet), just imagine something like Veiviev’s newest VR Girlz fare, but with the ability to get up and actually walk around the models. Of course other games will benefit immensely from the large tracking area, but hey this is a VR Porn Blog so you can’t blame us for keeping our minds in the gutter!
Now lets talk a little bit about the other big thing the Vive has going for it, the controllers! While we don’t know much about the technical specs behind the new method of interaction, we do know that the current developer edition controllers are 1:1, have a touch-pad for input, and that there is virtually no lag whatsoever; and while at present they are tethered to the PC, the consumer edition will be completely wireless.
Ergonomic and utilizing the same precision laser tracking system as the headset itself, pretty well anything you can imagine doing in real life can now be accomplished in virtual reality. Now for the world of Adult VR this is the game-changer we have been waiting for. Imagine being able to actually reach out and touch a girl (or guy) in VR! It’s not hard to imagine that an API could be built to allow interaction between these and various teledildonics devices either; but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet and wait a month or two down the road before we really start to speculate.
The headset is also very lightweight and comfortable, so it can be worn for any length of time without you feeling weighed down. There are headphone jacks on the side of the developers edition, but the final version will be equipped with a built-in audio solution, which will hopefully be binaural in the same direction that Oculus is going.
Let us know in the comments below what you all think of this new piece of VR awesomeness and what it might mean for the world of Adult VR; and if happen to be one of the lucky few who have so far gotten to try the Vive at recent events, please tell us all what your experience was like and your thoughts on how Adult VR applications will likely benefit (or not) from it’s new features.
