The long history of how I ended up buying an HTC Vive..

[MainFragger]

First of all, I am a movie addict.  I love movies and television and for years have been looking at glasses like MyVue or Vusix , or more recently the Avegant Glyph to be my personal video and 3D viewer.   And to be honest, I came very close to going with the Glyph..

 

About a half a year ago, I found out there was a Wireless VR rig called the "Omimo Uranus One".  I don't want to write a full review for it here, but I'll try my best to sum it up quickly to give you an idea why I returned it.    The unit was a wireless Android 3D visor that was suppose to have apps and head tracking and wifi.  You could play clips and pictures off of a mini-sd card, or hook the unit up to any source that supported an HDMI connection.  In theory, it was a great little systems.  And at just under $300, I thought it was a good value...until it arrived.   I want to first of all state that I don't think what was delivered to me is the usual intended product.  I think the OS and apps were not installed properly.   If it ran Android, it ran the most stripped down, no non-sense version that you can possibly imagine.  You could navigate menues by moving your head and hitting an OK button on the side.  But the moment you went into an app you lost your head tracking (unless the app specifically supported it).   Depending on the app, you can sometimes turn it on from within the app.  But there was no way to save that choice.  So you'd have to turn it on every single time you used that app.   

 

The thing that made me believe my unit wasn't complete was that there was no app store or web browser on the system..despite several references on their ads and documentation to downloading new software over the wifi connection.

 

Anyway, long story short (I know..too late) I was never able to get the wireless controller that it came with to sync with the unit, and there were a LOT of different app and UI issues I ran into.  Eventually I threw in the towel and gave up on it.

 

I will say this.  For what I was able to get to work (watching movies and playing 3D games off of my Xbox360)   it was a neat little device.  And considering its wireless features and cheap price, if this unit had really worked well, the Rift or the Vive would have seemed like a joke to me.   Thought process: "Those expensive units only work with the computer and not gaming systems, and stand alone blu-ray players?  Pfff....Yeah..I MIGHT spend money on that.."  I can tell you this, Omimo beat Rift and HTC to the market..had they done it right, both companies would have been forced to delay their products to make wireless versions...they would have had no choice in the matter if they wanted to stay marketable.

 

But alas, it didn't work out that way.  The unit was a piece of crap at every turn.  The lenses sucked, the OS sucked, the UI sucked, just trust me when I say everything about it sucked.. other than how well the head tracking worked. 

 

Once I realized that I wasn't really going to get a quality product at that price range, and that they'd all ship from China if I did.. I decided it was time to move on to the Rift. I mean, its a little more than double the price.. but I had seen the rift at a local convention, and I was pretty blown away by it.

 

And then there was the Vive.  And the thing is this.. it was $200 more..but came with some pretty nifty controllers and room sensors.   Almost every critic was saying that it was the way to go for a real VR experience.. So I bit the bullet and bought the Vive.  And I have been learning ever since.  This product is the very definition of learning curve.  But it is just flexible and cool enough to be worth while.