Vive Cosmos feedback?

[Genesis]

Hi, I'm brand new here, 
   The aspect of Virtual Reality really interested me, as i saw my friend with a Vive (original) play blade and sorcery on steam. The Vive when it debuted on steam blew my mind but the price tag was a bit much. As time went on i see the Vive Cosmos, i read into a lot of it. The ability to eventually upgrade to light house tracking i feel is a huge plus but because of my current set up i'd need internal tracking. 

   About 30 youtube video reviews, numerous things on the forums i noticed were all dated last year, So i wanted to ask the community here, do you all recommend the Vive Cosmos? Have they fixed the issues with it? and ultimately what is your personal experience with it? 

Thank you for your time and replies 🙂

[JohnyDL]

I have the elite and I've only had it a month but I love it, almost all the issues I've experienced were either created by me or were solved with software, there are some outlier cases of games requiring nvidia GPUs when I have RX570 but I imagine there will be some issues with not having Radeon sooner or later.

I can't say much for the upgrade path other than right now it doesn't exist, as far as I can tell the upgrade path is entirely theoretical, you could get the light houses and controllers but the face plates as far as I can tell aren't sold separately.

I can't say anything about the inside out experience either but the lighthouse one is fantastic, and I still go into things and experience the novelty of VR over and over. I've racked up some 36 ish hours (averaging more than an hour a day) in just beat sabre. What I'd say though is if you're going to buy into VR have a use and a role for it don't rely on the novelty aspect to keep you engaged and coming back. My use for it is Exercise. I'm really bad at that I always have been and VR has had me working out everyday really for the first time it was the push I needed to do more than sit at a computer screen 12 hours a day even if I VR is still staring at screens it's not the same. Your reasons doesn't have to be an every day thing it can be once a week or once a month but make the time to use it and have fun with it and have something that VR fills that you're needing.

I have friends who brought into VR and recommended me against it (although lightly) because to them it's a toy that they don't get the use of very often because of their busy lives and just how time consuming initiating VR can be. If you have a console or something else that would divide your time VR might not suit you because VR will always take a little extra effort to set up and get started and then you're going to build up a sweat even doing light gaming and want to shower afterwards, where you might spend 2-3 hours console gaming you'll lose maybe 20-30 minutes just to clearing your VR space getting into VR and then putting everything back after, Suddenly because of this lost time all those other options will seem a lot more inviting when you're deciding what games to play.

If you end up loving VR like me you'll be frustrated by all the games you can't play in VR and gaming without VR might become a little dull in comparison (for a while). Only you'll know if that's how things might turn out for you.

[Genesis]

Thanks for the feedback, As for myself, i talked with an HTC person and you're right the face plate isn't available "Yet", but you can see it in the accessories. I would really love to have the lighthouse set up but unfortunately i dont have the room to have the set up. 

Much like you, I also suck at working out. I typically swim a lot during the summer but once winter hits i'm huddled inside constantly hahaha. So i can completely understand where you're coming from! Boxing, Beat saber, some of the horror games, Half life Alyx, and a few other games have caught my eye. As i primarily work from home i'm constantly stuck inside doing graphic design or commissions for people. Also i'm not much of a gym person either so again, yeah i will be using it for similar purposes as you. 

As for your feedback, I really appreciate it! By the means of stuff i've heard it's has been making me worry a bit about the purchase, however HTC does make some really good technology and i do have faith in them as developers of the tech thats coming out. I do play a lot of games out of VR so if i do end up loving it as much as you, i'd feel it to be a happy frustration because at least i know my money was well spent! 😄  

[JohnyDL]

You can't really have a space too small for light house set up, your limitation really comes on where you can mount the hardware, if you have the room for standing VR and plan to box or beat sabre you have enough room for lighthouses. The play space can be much smaller than the space where you mount the lighthouses, I mounted one of mine above my desk with a stand and another behind my couch, the boxes are about as far away from each other as they can be and I have a 1.5m square I can play in if I'm too lazy to move my couch into my kitchen.

I didn't do the best job of mounting my lighthouse at first (it fell and broke, entirely my fault) but that did lead me to running with only one lighthouse for a little while and the setups can be a lot more flexible than just overhead and in the corners, for beatsaber at least, one lighthouse mounted directly in front of where you're swinging gives great tracking, you won't be able to play games in all directions but there's solid tracking with setups that're not the recommended ones. The boxes also have a great FOV so you can be right on top of them or under them and still use them for tracking in many cases. I have no doubt that if I put my 2 boxes at the corners of my 1.5m square I'd be able to track inside it (though the only way I could do that is by mounting to the ceiling something my landlord doesn't want me to do -> so one wall mount and one stand.

I can't stress how good Google Earth VR is, it's entirely free and if you want the good bits of a good long walk outside without having to go outside I would recommend it.

My goal to feel like money well spent is 200 played hours to cover the purchase of the hardware as a good deal, I'm well on course for that within 5 months. Though if I get to share it with friends eventually that hour target may get a lot lower. I don't know how you value your time, but with VR I want it to be better value for money than going to the cinema. This has long been my standard for buying upgrades, it's a stupid target in many respects, after all the cinema is a rip off compared to say streaming or buying the DVD of a film but it's still what I think of as the gold standard of entertainment, it's kinda like how spending money on seats to be in a sports ball stadium is so much less than watching it on TV in a pub where you have commentary and unlimited access to food and beer and comradery yet going to the stadium is still the gold standard for many on how to enjoy sports ball, "Go Team. Go Sport!" xD You if you're going to use it as a pseudo swimming then maybe that should be your measuring stick, how much does swimming cost you per hour? how many hours of VR do you need to get out of a VR headset, do you think it'll be a yearly purchase or something every two or three years as technology evolves? For me I expect my gaming computer to get a full or near full replacement every 2-3 years and any year I do that I can't upgrade anything else big and computer related so my VR plan might be that it should alternate with the upgrade cycle on the rest of my computer.

If you're a graphic designer I'd also point you to the art and 3D cad programs many of which are free or free with Vive Port Infinity, I find them a lot more intuitive than 2D software although my skill with using either is still near zero. You might not find them being perfect but I'm kinda looking forward to the future of these technologies where VR+2D design can be used in tandem or swapping between them is easy.

I hesitated for years before buying VR, I looked at the Oculus Dev Kit, the Rift, the Vive, Vive Pro, Cosmos and Index when each came out and I waited to see what the reviews were like and what the experience was like for users. Until steam VR it was a hard no for me, I wanted something I could jump into and enjoy not design and program for myself, and VR didn't really seem mature on Steam for a while. There was only really Beatsaber that interested me for a good while too, but I put some money aside anyway because I knew VR was getting closer to being a ready for me experience. Then this lockdown happened, I had the money and Alyx was released all at almost the same time and it seemed that more serious VR games were on the horizon, and that there were going to be shortages of all tech over the next year or maybe two and all that combined to me deciding now was the time. Manufacture is going to be short a lot of things for a while, supply is going to be low so prices won't get better, new designs will take longer than planned to come to market, basically what was the best thing available in march 2020 is going to be the best thing available in september 2020 and looking at all the options the future flexibility of the Cosmos was what sold me, I brought the lighthouse version because that's a combination of what I could afford and what worked best for the setup I planned to have for the next year or two, but if I ever bite the bullet and buy something portable with the horses to run VR I can do the "upgrade" of buying the inside out tracking stuff later. The reverse of what you're doing in effect.

[Genesis]

@JohnyDL  Thank you so much for explaining all this. The lighthouse tracking does seem like it might be better to get at this point. I didn't know the ranges it would require. Much like the Kinect for the xbox I did some of the kinect games but there was times where i had to duck and it went under the viewing point. So i didn't think lighthouses would be essential in small spaces. I suppose if i move one of the chairs i would have a much bigger area to move in. 
   I think i may lean more toward getting the lighthouse tracking over the cosmos inside out tracking due to the many many tracking issue reviews i've seen. I was looking to essentially hope that the Vive Cosmos has been fully fixed to the point of the tracking being near flawless but it seems that's more able to run with the lighthouse tracking. 
 Alyx was a game i really am looking forward to, Not to mention beat saber, arizona sunshine was a game my friend wants me to play with him and you're right, games have been slowly increasing with VR support. Also I noticed that games like Hellblade have also got VR updates that have also peaked my interest. 

Again thank you for the feedback, it's really helping influence my decisions on getting the set! Thank you!

[JohnyDL]

You're welcome

I do think there will be a lot of upgrades coming in software and hardware too but right now the lighthouses are a clear winner, each station has a 120 degrees of view both virtically and horisontally, the reason they suggest setting them up in the corners is because with that FOV they should see the whole playspace and more, there's less things that can obstruct the laser lights and when you can't be seen by one you can be seen by the others. You actually have it a little backward because Inside out Tracking is a lot closer to the kinect and the limitations of that. The lighthouse tracking system is actually more like the Wiimote tracking system (which was flawed since it only worked when pointing the Wiimote at the TV), I don't know if you had a Wii original but rather than the boxes looking out and trying to track points of your body or on a device each device looks for the lighthouses. In WiiMotes there were two constantly flashing IR LEDs on a strip you placed under or above the TV while the controllers had IR cameras installed the position was worked out by where the two dots appeared, how far apart, which LED flashed first and the angles is enough to determine the location of the camera, while in VR the light houses send out Laser scan lines both Virtically and Horrisontally all the seeing is done by the sensors on the controllers and headset, all the working out of where the device is can be found from just timing how long after the start of each sweep the sensor sees the vertical or horizontal laser pings, this locates the sensor to it's exact point in space with 20 or so sensors on each controller and the face plates that works out position and orientation of everything pretty accurately.

I've only completed up to chapter 2 of Alyx I never played the original halflife before so I'm taking it slowly and enjoying the story. I'm going to be getting StarTrek Bridge Crew and the DLC soon so I can play that with some friends, but I'm liking that there are other things that I already owned that in VR are amazing Universe Sandbox and Table Top Simulator which I can play in VR while people with out VR can join in through more traditional PC gaming. I think there's now enough players 30K (just beat saber reviewers on steam) that we're now a market that's worth tapping into. If you can get just 10% people with the device to buy a game at $30 each that's $100k game it's not an AAA budget but it's still a respectable game budget, and if the game already exists and it's just porting and adjusting controller options I think we've seen that's enough to make it something that VR players who like that genre anyway will opt into trying, worst case they get a passable sit down at a keyboard game.

Edited May 5, 2020 by JohnyDL