Seamus K - Irish tech industry expat living in Sweden.

Day: 5 April 2016

Oculus Rift vs the HTC Vive

I have been humming and hawing for a while about  VR headset. I am excited by the technology and I have played around with it at work (2nd gen Oculus) and at CES (3rd Gen). Hey I had even played around with one of the original arcade VR systems back in the 1990s when they first came out.

The problem has been deciding which headset to go for – Oculus Rift or a HTC Vive. The descriptions of the capabilities of the Vive do seem better – full room scale VR, and it will ship with proper controllers. Though there haven’t been proper head to head comparisons yet but they will come.

The reality though is that the Oculus Rift has already lost this battle, and has a serious credibility problem. Less than a month from the launch date, they have amassed three pretty major strikes against themselves*:

  • They bungled the launch and seriously mislead consumers with their pricing shock. After leading everyone to believe that the device would cost about $350 they came in with a price nearly twice that.
  • They don’t have the controllers ready. Buyers have to make do with an X-Box controller which hobbles the experience. HTC are providing their handset with the right UI hardware from the start.
  • And now it appears they cannot even ship the headset. It is not clear how many people (other than journalists) got them, but it looks like most punters are being told they won’t get theirs yet. It is a launch that is not a launch.

The race for the VR business is just beginning, and already Oculus are coming across as shifty and a laggard compared to the competition. Much of this may be because – Oculus is backed by the deep pockets of Facebook, but neither has ever shipped hardware before. HTC for all its troubles in the handset business is experienced at this.

In the next year or two we may see the market discussion go the way of the console wars where Playstation and XBox sales figures are compared every quarter. But just as the PS4 soundly thrashed the XBox One in terms of sales, I think the same is in store for the Oculus – despite the price difference.

Once I have sold the kidney to pay for it, I know which one I will certainly be getting.

* And now Eve Valkyrie, which was a launch exclusive title for the Rift will be available for the Vive later this year. That was something of a killer app for me. Now it is coming to the competition that’s game set and match to the Vive.

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Good start to the day

There needs to a a word (something we can borrow from German perhaps) that describes that perfect moment when you are commuting to work by car, channel hopping the radio stations trying to find something that is not inane presenter chatter, ads, jingles, or music you hate, when you arrive on a station just as a brilliant song you haven’t heard in ages starts and you get to listen to the whole thing uninterrupted from end to end, so a smile arrives on your face for the rest of your journey. Maybe Pendelnmusikspürsinn or something.

I had such a Pendelnmusikspürsinn moment on the way to work this morning. The song was John Cale’s version of Hallelujah. This is the one that turned Leonard Cohen’s otherwise unremarkable song into the something amazing. In recent years it has been covered repeatedly, especially as a sort of religions anthem. Which is amusing as when you actually listen to the lyrics you realise it is filthy. The original versions are all about sex:

You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

She tied you to a kitchen chair..
..And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

or how about this verse:

There was a time when you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show that to me, do ya?

followed by:

But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

To be fair Cohen wrote over 80 verses, and many have biblical references. So it is possible to put together a version that looks religious. But Cohen himself has said the song is about love and ecstasy. And that is far more fun for the drive to work.

 

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I love Vegans, but I couldn’t eat a whole one

There is a joke about vegans that goes – “How do you know if someone is a vegan? Don’t worry they’ll tell you”.

Is it true?

Well at on my hike last weekend I offered to take the group photo. It gives me a great excuse not to be in it. I had the camera, a real one, and not a smart phone, and I said “say cheese”. From the group I got a chorus of “cheese” and one “but I am a vegan”.

I can confirm the guy was a vegan, as he could be heard during much of the day going on at length about his vegan-ism from the other end of the hike.

No wonder some of them get a reputation for being humourless bores.

 

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