Hardware Overview: HTC Vive

This article focuses on the VIVE hardware and as a platform for making works of art. When a handful of artists and developers got their hands on the early Oculus Rift kit in 2013, I was skeptical about it. It certainly wasn’t the first time that Virtual Reality had been promised as a paradigm shifting platform and my own early experiences in 90’s arcades had been deeply disappointing. I’d been following the hype since the device was announced in 2012 and while it seemed clear that it would be a great way to play first person shooters, I imagined it would be useful for little else. In 2014 I was at the Currents New Media Festival and one of the featured works was<a href="https://vimeo.com/89607805"> Assent, by Oscar Raby. People kept telling me “You have to see this! It’s incredible.” Going into Raby’s piece I had no idea that I would come out of it with tears in my eyes or that my ideas of what the medium could offer would be completely altered. A remarkably personal story, it was one of the most engaging and affecting art experiences I have ever had. Raby had used the VR medium to tell his story in a way that would be impossible without it. Rather than making me feel disconnected or isolated (I, like many people, have mixed feelings about any medium that could potentially further isolate and disembody us) I emerged from the work feeling more intimately connected to the stranger and his family than I could have ever expected. If you ever have a chance to see Assent, I highly recommend it.

Despite this overwhelmingly positive experience, I was still skeptical about VR at large until last summer. I was at an artist residency at the Pilchuck Glass School outside of Seattle, WA, with my NoiseFold collaborator, David Stout. We were working with some amazing gaffers trying to bring digital forms to life in the hot shop when a friend in the area, Reilly Donovan, got in touch with us. He had seen our performances and installations and insisted on helping us to get some noise folding in Virtual Reality. Thanks to an early version of the VR package by Graham Wakefield and the Alice Lab for Computational Worldmaking at York University, Toronto, we had Max up and running on the HTC VIVE in no more than 45 minutes. Since then I have put quite a few hours into the VIVE, culminating in my recent collaboration with Stout and Donovan, Vesica Pisces. I’ll talk more about that later, but first, some thoughts on the VIVE.

Hardware

The $799 VIVE ships with a headset, two handheld motion controllers, two Lighthouse motion trackers that allow for the room-scale VR, a small box to bridge the headset with the machine, a pair of earbuds, the necessary peripheral cables, two different foam pads for differently shaped faces, and a lint-free cloth.

The headset sports velcro straps to adjust the HMD and provides some cable management for the 15-foot cable. It also has two elements that control the distance from the lenses to the eyes and the distance between the lenses themselves, both of which are really helpful for optimizing the optical experience of individual users. The front of the headset also has a front-facing camera, which can be used by developers for AR (Augmented Reality). Some things worth noting.

1. The HMD does not include integrated headphones, only a mini-jack to plug in your own. Choosing the right headphones is a question of comfort and home vs public use.

2. It now ships with a 3-in-1 cable that combines the previously discrete HDMI, USB and power into one cord. While easier to manage and likely a better solution for home use, in a high-volume installation environment the 3-in-1 quickly starts showing signs of wear and damaged memory.

Another thing to consider is hygiene. The official word on cleaning the VIVE is basically to dab the foam pad and gently wipe the lenses. In practice this is not enough, at least for my tastes. For gamers, you are likely to soak the thing in sweat and for artists, to want to share you work. There are a number of different VR covers, replacement pads, cleaning methods, etc. that you can and probably should look into if you plan to have multiple users. I end up soaking the pads with antibacterial soap and water, then air drying and using wipes on the headset. I also have different covers and an ultraviolet sanitizing wand. So far so good, but I am sure that I’ll be replacing plenty of face pads.

The Controllers

The overall design of the controllers works very well. The lanyards are soft and secure, the batteries hold a good charge (usb-micro for charging), and the touchpad offers a lot of control possibility without being overly complicated. The Tilt Brush app, free from the Steam Store, does a great job of demonstrating how the various buttons can be used to create a seamless in-world UI control experience. While the controllers are comfortable to hold, in my limited experience using them for gaming, they can definitely take a toll on the index finger after extended use. They also seem a bit larger than necessary, and don’t feel “right” for everything they emulate. (Admittedly, it is not an easy task to make something that can feel equally like a gun, sword and ping-pong paddle, but I imagine future iterations of the VIVE and competitors will be looking at this. The Oculus Touch for example, while I have only used it once, has a much smaller profile and clearly takes a different approach.)

The Lighthouses

The two lighthouse sensors, responsible for letting you walk around in a roughly 15x15 foot area while using the VIVE, are small but hefty black boxes. They come with well designed mounts that offer a wide adjustment range and an optical sync cable to help stabilize tracking. Equipped with a standard ¼” mounting hole, there are a lot of mounting options including mic booms, tripods and various grip arms. For proper tracking, these have to stay put once set, so I appreciate that a standard fitting was used. The 15 square foot trackable area definitely lets you move, but when you get engrossed it feels like a major limitation; it’s enough room to walk all the way around an object, but not nearly enough to explore a world. Still, I love being able to move freely and I imagine this limitation will expand before long.

Peripherals

There are a growing list of accessories that are not part of the stock package, from replacement pads, cables, and lighthouses to extra motion trackers. One notable accessory is the new Deluxe Audio Strap, which integrates the headphones into a revamped head strap. These sold out immediately upon release, so at the time of this writing I have not used them and they are not available. It’s no surprise that these sold out quickly as anything that can streamline the gearing up process is a big win.

The Computer

Here’s the harder pill to swallow. The VIVE currently does not run on any Mac systems and requires some heavy lifting. Make sure your system is powerful enough by checking the VR ready requirements or using the SteamVR Performance Test.

Software

Steam VR

No matter what you are doing with it, the VIVE requires you to use Steam and the Steam VR app. Setting up the VIVE with Steam VR is a surprisingly simple process. The app is really well designed and guides you through each step from calibrating the floor to tracing out your room. Assuming your lighthouses are set up and everything is connected properly, this usually takes only a couple of minutes. If gaming is your end goal, the Steam store will also give you access to a library of VR capable games.

The VR Package

If you are reading this article and interested in VR, chances are you want to use the VIVE with Max. Thanks to Graham Wakefield, you can head over to the Package Manager inside Max 7 and download the VR package. The VR object can be used with either the Oculus or the VIVE and gives you access to the position and orientation data of the HMD to setup your camera views of the 3D render world. You also get all the data from the controllers for either device, and with the VIVE you can even access the front-facing camera. The example gets you going with a jit.gl.node context and can have you up and running in a matter of minutes. Keep in mind that the target frame-rate is around 90fps, so you will want to limit your number of objects and their resolutions and try to do all of your texture processing on the GPU with jit.gl.slab or jit.gl.pix.

Audio

Location and orientation-aware audio processing is something you will likely have to figure out on your own for the time being. There are a lot of different companies working on solutions, so before long I expect that there will be some really great plug and play options.

Thoughts

VR is nothing new. The access, ease of use, and range of tools for creating content are. Perhaps the most intriguing thing for me so far about working in VR is scale. From softball sized forms to seemingly endless vaulted caves, size is convincing and the possibilities are vast. During the exhibitions of Vesica Pisces and the earlier sketch, The Observer Effect, I’ve watched many hundreds of people enter and engage with the generative abstract environments contained within. Some take off the headset in seconds, but many keep it on for several minutes or even an hour without a break. Some freeze, some punch at the air in front of them, while others lay down on the ground or jump in the air to try and see just a little bit higher. One child, after spending quite a while inside, looked down and then tore off the headset and ran to the other person in the room exclaiming “Look at your legs! I found out you don’t have a body in there!”

I feel there is an opportunity to make a contribution to this medium by expanding beyond military training, gaming, photo-realistic environments, and industrial applications into deeply aesthetic and embodied experiences of the alien and sublime. In the hands of artists, VR can be more than just Virtual - it can be a gateway to realities unknown.