I have a vive, and my lighthouses are on collapsible tripods that sit in corners of my living room when i'm playing. Takes ~5 min of time to set both up, point them in the right direction, and setup room boundaries in Steam. Works really well, if you prefer to do it that way! I think I would still prefer inside-out tracking, but I have very specific reasons for only using the Vive, so that's what I'm stuck with. I think it's a problem that can easily be overcome if you're interested in this headset, without having to drill holes into walls! It's definitely an extra expense though.
However, if their whole goal was "smallest lightest headset" then you can't really blame them for removing every single piece of tech from the headset they possibly could and outsourcing it to another device to maintain that claim. The right call? I dunno. But if this headset can be a drop-in replacement for my Vive one, I will buy the hell out of that. It's a strict upgrade for me with basically no extra expenditure of effort/money beyond the cost of the headset.
> "However, if their whole goal was "smallest lightest headset" then you can't really blame them for removing every single piece of tech from the headset they possibly could and outsourcing it to another device to maintain that claim."
Sure you can - IMO (and of course reasonable minds can disagree) - you can surely blame a product when they've optimized to the point of going below-MVP.
I get the desire to be smaller and lighter than the rest, but IMO inside-out is table stakes and is part of the "minimum viable" requirement...
I've seen the portable lighthouse setups, but IMO that's even worse. I've done the lighthouse setup back when it was I had the Oculus CV1 - and those didn't even need to be positioned high on the walls, and IMO it was a huge pain the ass. I think I ended up using them a total of 5 times because of how much fiddling was required to get into VR.
PCVR is already a vanishingly small market, this particular quirk of the spec IMO puts the product below minimum viability.
This is a relatively small company, and this I think is their first foray into hardware. It makes sense they are targeting a niche market (PC VR users who already have a steamVR headset). Specifically, they are a company that makes Bigscreen VR, a desktop mirroring app. A lot of people bought Indexes, or Vives, and this is a possible sidegrade to those, especially if you are interested in the idea of "VR virtual desktops", which seems to be the entire point of this headset, with very high resolution and extremely low weight, and not even a 3.5mm jack for headphones.
However, if their whole goal was "smallest lightest headset" then you can't really blame them for removing every single piece of tech from the headset they possibly could and outsourcing it to another device to maintain that claim. The right call? I dunno. But if this headset can be a drop-in replacement for my Vive one, I will buy the hell out of that. It's a strict upgrade for me with basically no extra expenditure of effort/money beyond the cost of the headset.
To each their own though!