Pretty impressed with the Vive in AH Beta - see a ton of potential here, flying low alt screaming through the trees and valleys was an unreal experience. The hand controllers are set up very well in AH too, using Hotas, the Vive controllers, and regular mouse/kb by feel/touch is pretty powerful stuff. Little things I need to figure out still like some settings "TrackIR" in the VR settings, etc. The icons disappear when they are in the hud once you get close, but I didn't mess with GUI icon settings at all yet. Overall, first impression after an hour of the Vive with AH is very good, and in the near future I can see it really being popular.
With my 1080 systems, using a single GPU (no sli for VR yet that works well), AH beta was 90 fps with settings maxed and just the reflections turned down a notch, no FPS issues at all.
Rift I'm trying tomorrow, the other sim/cockpit games forums all agree that the Rift is better in the cockpit, where as Vive for now is better for standing/room scale games, but the Vive is still pretty good in the cockpit games I tried, DCS, Elite, etc.
The first time I had the Vive on, and the demo came up, and the laser came shooting out of the hand controller, I knew it was money well spent - this is going to be amazing once people start creating stuff, and the drivers/hardware matures. I could see a very, very accurate combat simulator for ground troops with realistic shaped controllers being in the future soon, like Arma but with room scale and hand held weapons.
The Rift is a lot cheaper than the Vive, but doesn't come with much, as said, the one camera on a short stand, the Xbox controller, and that's about it. The Vive box was the size of a PC case box, has 2 cameras, two large handsets, 2 chargers for both (usb/wall plug combo), a cable to connect the cameras if you so desire (you don't have to, it's just if they can't see each other well you can physically link them with that long cable). After drawing the gaming space with the handheld controllers and setting them on the floor to map that, it only took minutes to get up and running for room scale gaming - holding up the controllers in VR, it's almost easy to forget that it's in VR, they are that precise, even if you set them down for sit down gaming. The Vive also has a front camera, which the Rift doesn't. Anyhow, the Rift delivered cost me exactly 914$ CDN, and the Vive was 1274$ CDN, 360$ CDN difference. They both arrived with a few days of ordering, no backlog now, the Vive was 3 business days, the Rift about 5 total for shipping. Quality is excellent with both, they don't feel cheap in the slightest, the Vive hand controllers are particularly robust feeling, intelligently placed triggers and buttons.
If you want to see the potential of the future handheld controllers for the Rift, great Star Trek demo here showing them in action - the Razer open source will be one I get too, as I'm hoping there are piles of aftermarket controllers coming, including rifle/handgun shaped ones for future combat simulations. Even swords are a possibility IMO. The coming Rift controllers look like they sit in the hand comfortably and that it won't take much effort to hold them.
