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PSVR vs. HTC Vive vs. Oculus Rift vs. Gear VR: Which VR headset should you buy?

zboson
Superstar
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/best-vr-headset-2016-psvr-rift-vive/

Not very positive comments from Ars on the Rift

"That leaves the Oculus Rift, and, well, as lovely as it is, it’s in VR no-man’s-land right now. It doesn’t have the ease of use of PSVR, and it also requires a lengthy setup and PC like the Vive. It also doesn’t have the hand tracking tech of either right now, so all current games use a standard Xbox controller, which breaks immersion. It’s not cheap either at £549 or $600. Oculus Touch will help, but that’s another £190 or $200 on top of that, and it’s not launching until December. If it had launched with Touch, Oculus would be a far more compelling proposition at this stage, but it’s hard to recommend"

Conclusion

"So there you have it: if money's no object and you’ve got the room, go
for the HTC Vive. My money’s on PlayStation VR, though. It’s affordable,
the games are great, and you don’t need to completely rearrange your
entire living space in order to use it."
39 REPLIES 39

zboson
Superstar


I am a daily reader at ARS, and they are a great site but... they actively trash the Rift on the site. Even mentioning that you enjoy the Oculus Rift in the comments will get you down voted to hell.


This article aside I feel that ARS has not trash talked the Rift.  For example this one from early this year shortly after the Rift and Vive started shipping.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/the-ars-vr-headset-showdown-oculus-rift-vs-htc-vive/

"If we could combine the Vive's platform and controller scheme with the
paid-for exclusives and headset design of the Rift, we might have the
perfect virtual reality headset for 2016. But as it stands, the Vive's
positives outweigh its negatives slightly more than the Rift's."

They basically said that the Oculus would be better if it had controllers like the Vive. Well it will have controllers soon.

However, they did have three articles on the Palmer Luckey incident and the public response in the comments was huge and most of them were very negative towards Oculus after that. They even had an article about him missing at OC3 though this one was less commented then the other three.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/oculus-hides-company-founder-in-a-box-lets-someone-else-addres...

FourT2
Expert Protege


Lengthy setup? Really? I must have did something wrong. Because it was really easy to me.
And waiting another 2 months is not very much time to wait to be honest.
And price will be about the same as Vive.

And he talkes about PSVR is cheap. Well, if you have a PS4.


LOL yeah I wonder if the author bothered to setup each one themselves. PSVR took me about as long or longer to setup as Rift. 

FourT2
Expert Protege

zboson said:

@snowdog

Ars did not have such a gloomy picture of PSVR's tracking as you.

"True, PSVR’s archaic tracking system isn’t as accurate as the Vive’s, but it’s good enough, especially considering the price."



"True, living in a mobile home is not as good as living in a brand new 5 bedroom home, but it is good enough, especially considering the price."

jim1174
Protege
The only thing I don't like is when people say psvr is cheaper because it
is only 399. The fact is 99% of the people who own a playstation don't even own
the controllers or camera because they think motion control is a gimmick and don't like it. So i
will just bet that 99 % of people buying the psvr are going to get the bundle
for 499. 

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
Tis true Jim but you could do without the move controllers bringing the cost down a little more. The thing with the  $499 bundle is you get Playstation Worlds game thrown in as well which is a $39.99 game if purchased separately.


System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.

FourT2
Expert Protege


I am a daily reader at ARS, and they are a great site but... they actively trash the Rift on the site. Even mentioning that you enjoy the Oculus Rift in the comments will get you down voted to hell.


Well fork them in the ars then. 

Hanover
Rising Star

FourT2 said:



I am a daily reader at ARS, and they are a great site but... they actively trash the Rift on the site. Even mentioning that you enjoy the Oculus Rift in the comments will get you down voted to hell.


Well fork them in the ars then. 


lol.

I took Ars off my news feed a month or so ago.  They used to be this non-biased, extremely technical consumer electronics news and reviews site.  Now they are a pretentious version of Reddit.

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
"If we could combine the Vive's platform and controller scheme with the
paid-for exclusives and headset design of the Rift, we might have the
perfect virtual reality headset for 2016. But as it stands, the Vive's
positives outweigh its negatives slightly more than the Rift's.
"

Umm... that is literally saying that the Vive is better than the Rift lol

And the first part of that quote is suggesting that the Vive adopt some things from the Rift in order to become the best headset. They aren't suggesting that the Rift itself could be a best headset.

Ars definitely hates Oculus.

zboson
Superstar
@FourT2 you are the second person to respond as if I wrote the quote "True, PSVR’s archaic tracking system isn’t as accurate as the Vive’s, but it’s good enough, especially considering the price."  I did not write that. I quoted it from a reviewer on Ars. It's his opinon.

The reason I quoted it is because he has experience with the Rift and PSVR. Every person that has used the PSVR and written about has said that Sony has done a good job and nobody said the tracking is a game stopper. You have to look at the whole picture.

Hopefully PSVR will lead to many cross platform VR games which will have better resolution and tracking with the Rift.  The Rift is comfortable enough for me so that I can use it for hours without a problem.

zboson
Superstar
@Zenbane
I quoted the wrong article. I mean to quote this one
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/why-vive-has-won-the-early-vr-race-in-my-house/.

This article at first may seem even more negative bad actually it's not. Here is the conclusion

"Despite its shortcomings in beloved Elite, for now and for me, the Vive wins—but the future’s not set. We’re less than two months into the launch of the first generation of consumer PC VR headsets that matter (the false starts of the 1990s don’t count). One of the two PC players doesn’t even have its complete offering for sale yet. Oculus should have its own 3D Oculus Touch controllers available later this year, and when that happens, I might totally revise my stance. I look forward to spending time with those Oculus Touch controllers to see if they help erase the meaningful differences between these two devices.

Truthfully, the Rift is that much better to wear for more than a few minutes. The Rift with operational 3D controllers that work room-wide would be killer—the headset I prefer to wear, coupled with the input method most (but not all!) VR games work best with? Yes, please!"

Let's not got down the path of discounting whole (Ars Technica in this case) sites just because we don't like their reviews. I agree that  Mark Walton in the origintal link I posted made many strange comments about the Rift and I'm not very impressed with his review of the Rift. However, Ars was very positive about Touch after OC3 so I expect that in a few months Ars will have a positive review about the Rift.