Gaming

It should be noted that for the first month, my computer was running a GTX 970 video card. The minimum recommended by Valve for a smooth VR experience. Since then I have acquired a GTX 1070, and that's made all the difference.

The Vive came with several games for free. And more were available on Steam as free downloads. Several games seemed at first to be nothing more than tech demos, and perhaps that was for the best, as the technology and the game style was brand new.

I wasn't prepared for how...smooth the interface was when I strapped the headset to my head. The Vive HMD has three velcro straps (two on the sides and one on top) and the cable, which you'd think gets in the way a lot, was quite easy to manage. When I fired it all up and went through the VR tutorial, I was standing in the middle of a white sterile circular chamber that was impossibly large. It wasn't until the personality core showed up that I realized I was in Aperture Science. Being a huge Portal fan, this pleased me. Moreso when I realized that this was the Source 2 engine running before my eyes.

The tutorial was quite excellent; it ran through how they're simulating moving around in the VR space, the controllers, the Chaperone system and what it can do. The Chaperone system is one of the better parts of the Vive's VR experience. During setup, you use one of the handheld controllers to trace out your "play area". The Lighthouses track the controller and define the area based on your movements during setup, and from that point on, each time you get close to the boundary, a faint grid appears in your HMD representing the "wall" of your play area. This boundary is fully customization: color, pattern, and even opacity.

Not only that, but since the Vive has an external front-facing camera, a quick double-tap of the menu button can bring up an external view. It looks kinda like a faint "Matrix"-esque outline of what you'd normally see, but you can clearly see people and objects in it so you can get your bearings if you need to.

Starting a game is just like using Big Picture mode on Steam, only now it's a really big picture. Naturally, the whole background (and the controller and Lighthouse skins) can be swapped out in the Steam Workshop. I currently have Aperture science skinned controllers and two of GladOS's security cameras representing the Lighthouses. Note: the Lighthouses are only visible during initial loading of a game and while in Big Picture VR mode.

I'll get more into the games in Part III below, but I can say so far that I've been extremely pleased with what they've released so far. One game I had in my library already (Elite: Dangerous) was VR capable since I purchased the game, but now I had the headset to use.

Part III: The Games coming soon