With the consumer-level virtual reality “revolution” now two years old, it’s about time to start thinking about what the second generation of high-end headsets can improve upon. But HTC’s first true shot at the “next generation” has us thinking less about the improvements and more about the cost.
HTC’s Vive Pro, launching this week, comes with a name and a price tag ($799 for an upgrade from the original Vive, or $1,099 for new Vive owners) that suggests a revelatory jump in the VR experience, well beyond what already wowed us in early 2016. But in practice, the Vive Pro feels more like a subtle refinement of existing ideas rather than a true next-generation follow-up.
In short, the new headset smooths out many of the biggest annoyances with the original Vive: there’s a more comfortable headstrap, integrated “spatial audio” headphones, and a higher-resolution screen that makes details pop in virtual reality. Those improvements make the Vive Pro quite possibly the best VR headset currently available for general consumer use.
Businesses and location-based entertainment venues likely won’t think twice about paying a few hundred dollars more for the top-of-the-line in current VR technology. For the rest of us who have to consider the value of those improvements compared to their cost in actual dollars, the calculus becomes much trickier.
Strap in
The standard headstrap that comes with the Vive Pro will be familiar to anyone who invested $100 in the Deluxe Audio Strap HTC released for the original Vive last year. Both are a huge improvement over the flimsy, ill-fitting, fabric-and-velcro strap that was by far the worst part of the original Vive package.
Like the Deluxe Audio Strap, the Vive Pro’s integrated headstrap features a firm, plastic wraparound band that can swivel 90 degrees upward, letting you slide it out of the way to put on the headset more easily (and letting you easily flip the eyepiece up briefly to look around the real world during use). After you slide the strap down, a convenient twisting ratchet on the back of your skull lets you adjust the sizing by about four inches of circumference, ensuring a snug fit around pretty much any skull size. A thick strip of velcro goes over the top of the head, but it feels barely necessary to achieve a comfortable grip.
The Vive Pro is actually a touch heavier than the original Vive with an added Deluxe Audio Strap, but it doesn’t feel that way. That’s because Vive Pro’s new strap rebalances the headset in a way that feels much more comfortable on the skull. Last year’s Deluxe Audio Strap didn’t quite fix the awkward top-of-head binding position, which always made the original Vive feel too forward-heavy. Thanks to a completely redesigned clasp on the side of the headset, the Vive Pro strap can rotate another 20-25 degrees closer to the neck—and it adds enough back-of-head padding to make that feel comfortable, not constraining.
As a result, the unit’s weight finally feels equally distributed between the back and front of the skull. The headset never feels in danger of falling off with fast motion, as it did with the original Vive strap. A redesigned and repositioned connection cable exerts less annoying tug on the top of your head, too—it has been converted to a single cable instead of the last model’s three-cable combo—but there’s still no getting around the sensation of a wire dangling from the side of your head down to the floor. (We’re still waiting for a price and release date for this year’s Vive Wireless Adapter, not to mention a sense of how well it will work.)
The Vive Pro also mimics the original Deluxe Audio Strap accessory in adding two drop-down, over-ear headphones on either side of the unit, and these rest on a swiveling slider for proper positioning. The earcups provide strong, directionally appropriate sound without totally blocking out the real world and can be quickly flipped up if you need to hear something unobstructed. (HTC representatives have told Ars that the Vive Pro’s earcups include noise-canceling technology, but we didn’t notice anything beyond the sensation of our ears being covered.) Buttons on the back of the earcups let you mute the microphone and adjust the computer volume quickly without leaving VR, which is very convenient for switching between games with very different sound profiles.
While one of our reviewers found the earcups fit his head just fine, the other found that they didn’t quite fully cover his ears no matter the adjustments. Still, even when sitting less than flush, both testers confirmed high-performing audio, even in the tricky high- and low-end spectrums. That’s no small perk for anyone eager to dive into music-heavy VR experiences like Rez and Thumper.
Despite the improvements, though, the Vive Pro still includes some of the same basic design problems of the original. The eyepiece housing (which now allows for additional room for eyeglasses, toggled by an easy button press and slider) still ends up pressed up tightly against the front of your face, creating a thick seal that traps heat and puts significant pressure on the sinuses. Any decently long VR session threatens to turn your face into a sweaty, red mess that can lead to significant steam buildup on the lenses. Worse, the front-of-face foam padding feels decidedly non-Pro. HTC has been showing this off at press events with a custom leather face cushion, and for this price, we wish they’d offered the same option as a consumer default.
The PlayStation VR, which suspends the eyepiece housing just in front of the eyes, remains the comfort champ. But the Vive Pro headstrap also feels a little over-engineered compared to the lighter, thinner, spring-loaded strap on the Oculus Rift, without offering much improvement in terms of overall comfort.
The Vive Pro is definitely a necessary step up from the wholly inadequate band that comes with the original Vive, and it’s also a slight step up from the Deluxe Audio Strap HTC has already put out. But the most concrete improvements in the HTC Vive are found internally, not externally.
Software on Vive Pro: Better ducks, clearer fetuses
The Vive Pro’s two 1440×1600 pixel displays, up from the 1080×1200 panels on the original Vive and Oculus Rift, get us one step closer to the mythical “8K resolution per eye” that would begin to approximate photorealism in a head-mounted display. It’s an important step for making out details in most games and applications but not one that makes the lower-resolution past feel intolerably outdated.
If you’re used to the VR experience on older headsets, you’ll notice an immediate overall increase in clarity on a Vive Pro. Before you even get into a game or app, text and logos in the SteamVR Home interface are clearer and more legible from a longer distance away. Diagonal lines that would have a noticeable “stairstep” effect on a lower-res headset look more natural on the Vive Pro. The edges of objects just look distinctly less fuzzy on the new headset, and details on characters and environmental models are a bit easier to resolve in your vision.
While the Vive Pro’s extra pixels aren’t enough to completely eliminate the much-maligned “screen-door effect” that’s so apparent on lower-resolution headsets, it does reduce that problem significantly. You have to strain your eyes quite a bit to make out the slight spaces between individual pixels on the Vive Pro. In many use cases you forget the individual pixels are even there, simply accepting the apparent 3D spherical monitor that seems to be surrounding you. The pixellation can still be a bit noticeable in games like Project Cars 2, though, where you end up focusing on one part of the track (and one area of the display) rather than moving your eyes around a lot.
The extra pixels are useful for more than aesthetics, too. In Superhot VR, it’s easier to make out incoming, itty-bitty bullets at a quick glance, which adds to the game’s incredible sense of faking like an omnipresent Neo in the Matrix. That same “I can see small, distant stuff more easily” effect is both subtle and pronounced in SteamVR’s most popular arcade-shooter games, particularly Duck Season, whose far-off ducks finally look like ducks instead of vague, gray blobs. The difference is just enough to help us better line up and time shots in the high-speed worlds of Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer—or, at least, we feel that much more comfortable doing so.
We even found ourselves newly interested in the likes of Orbus, a VR-only MMO that has been building up a Steam Early Access playerbase for nearly a year. When viewed through the Vive Pro, many of the VR-specific annoyances associated with viewing Orbus’ crowded MMO world melted away. This was best demonstrated when we asked a fellow online player to try to read some in-game text on his older Vive headset. He had to run his character roughly five body lengths away from a text prompt to make it out legibly. Our character could stand at no less than four times that distance and still make out the text.
It’s hard to undersell strapping into a sense-filling VR experience like Wonderful You or Thumper and seeing the default fuzz effect on first-gen PC headsets melt away. The former example, a free series of short films about how a human fetus develops, is utter Vive Pro catnip. The dramatically framed shots of tiny human forms or of dramatized animations of nerve and tissue development benefit hugely from the headset’s additional pixels. In some scenes, Vive Pro users can make out far-away details like developing eyes or hands without having to squint or lean in close.
And in some cases, Vive Pro’s pixels deliver the hard-to-quantify bonus of increased comfort. Bethesda’s Doom VFR is a great test case. In spite of its clever movement system that reduces motion sickness, the game can still feel tiring on a standard Vive. But played on Vive Pro, we felt newly eager to marathon the entire short game without feeling worn out or in need of a break. (The smooth performance on our test rigs also served as a great reminder of the optimizations in the id Tech 6 graphics engine.)
The resolution-bumping effect doesn’t improve all apps equally, though. Games built with “realism” in mind can suffer when their complex texture maps get blown up to a higher resolution than they were designed for, while simpler, more stylistic games get the fuller benefit of the added sharpness. We noticed this everywhere from grainy road textures in Project Cars 2 to fuzzy, baked-in shadow textures in Rick & Morty: Virtual Rickality.
We were surprised by one particular disappointment: Fallout 4 VR, which appears to target the older Vive and Oculus specs in every way possible. Its textures are some of the blurriest in a major VR game yet, and its walls of text don’t currently benefit from Vive Pro’s increased resolution since Bethesda doesn’t seem to have employed any vector scaling for its fonts. (Comparatively, Orbus offers profoundly sharp fonts even on its “lowest” setting.) But in playing around with SteamVR’s settings, we came to find that this game was suffering more from SteamVR’s automatic resolution adjustments than any other in our collection.
After disabling those automatic scalers, the game rendered far more sharply but also became a stuttering, nigh unplayable mess. This, we remind you, was on a 1080Ti PC that far exceeds the Vive Pro’s minimum spec. Ultimately, we found this game to be an outlier in terms of not scaling well to Vive Pro’s increased resolution, but we hope newer VR games don’t follow suit and run just as unevenly on the new headset.
Elsewhere, an app like Google Earth VR still suffers from blotchy assets, at least when you zoom all the way to ground level in a given city. From a macro level, though, it’s a treat to stand at the top of slightly blotchy Mount Everest in the Vive Pro. Should you keep the perspective zoomed out enough, you’re in for even more breathtaking views than standard Oculus or Vive headsets can currently deliver.
The extra resolution also comes in handy in productivity apps like Virtual Desktop, which projects a huge 2D monitor in front of your VR world (or even SteamVR’s built-in peek into the Windows desktop, which is less optimized). Common 2D computing tasks like Web browsing and word processing are much more feasible on the Vive Pro without the need to bump up the font size in every application. While working on this article, we were able to legitimately multitask within VR in a pinch, making out text in a giant Slack client and more precisely aiming our Vive wands at links on Reddit threads. It might not be quite comfortable enough for a full day’s work in VR, but it’s getting there.
What’s your money worth?
The biggest problem with the Vive Pro, in a way, is that it’s still competing with the original HTC Vive. That two-year-old device, which recently dropped to just $499 complete with controllers and room-scale tracking hardware, can play all the same games as the Vive Pro. It also easily provides an experience that’s 70- to 80-percent identical to that of the Vive Pro. Add the $100 Deluxe Audio Strap to the original Vive, and the main advantage of the Vive Pro is a slight increase in clarity.
While that increased fidelity is nice to have, it’s hard to argue that the experience is twice as good as that on the still perfectly serviceable hardware in the original Vive. Yet HTC is currently charging a little over twice the price to get the Vive Pro’s full starter kit (and that’s if you don’t have to upgrade your gaming rig to match the Pro’s increased graphics card requirements). HTC thankfully dropped the full-bundle Pro price, complete with required tracking boxes and wands, from $1,250 down to $1,099, but we’re still officially above $1K for this as a starting VR system.
It’s a cost that’s especially hard to swallow when competing headsets, like Samsung’s $499 HMD Odyssey, offer the same basic bump resolution at a much lower price. The Vive Pro definitely brings some advantages over the Odyssey in terms of solid tracking, controller design, and tight integration with the SteamVR ecosystem, but it’s far from clear that those advantages are worth so many hundreds of dollars in asking price.
And despite that sky-high cost, the Vive Pro doesn’t really do much to bring virtual reality hardware forward in a significant way. The field of view remains locked at the same limited 110 degrees (with the same exact Fresnel lens design), cutting off your peripheral vision in a way that feels limited compared to prototypes like StarVR. The “ski goggles” form factor and overall weight of the unit are still just uncomfortable enough to make extended gameplay sessions feel like a hassle. And the Vive Pro must continue to be tethered to a computer out of the box, though an official, WiGig-powered Vive Wireless Adapter promises to fix this problem some time this summer (HTC hasn’t announced a price for that unit, but competing wireless solutions for Vive retail for $299 and can only handle 2K resolutions).
We wouldn’t mind these continuing (and sometimes difficult-to-solve) issues sticking around if the Vive Pro was being positioned as an iterative, mid-generation update that’s only marginally more expensive than the original headset. For the amount of money HTC is charging, though, we’d expect a significant leap in VR capabilities that makes us truly reconsider what the state-of-the-art can be in the still-new space.
If $499 and $1,099 are about equally disposable to you (or to your legitimate business expenses), the Vive Pro definitely provides one of the best virtual reality experiences you can purchase today. If you’re not ready to spend money like water, though, we’d recommend sticking with a cheaper, older headset and putting the difference toward general computer upgrades, a high-end game console, or just a bunch of games to play on your still-adequate-enough original Vive.
