When it comes to VR, seeing is believing

I SUSPECT MY review of the HTC Vive Pro, from p48, is going to annoy people. In it, I bestow a PC Pro Recommended award upon a piece of hardware that costs £800 – even more if you don’t already own the sensors and controllers from the original HTC Vive. Oh, and it needs a high-end computer costing around £1,500 to work at its best. Let’s call it a £2,500 total investment and be done with it.

Aside from the cost, there’s the sheer awkwardness of having to wear a silly visor that’s attached to your computer with bulky wires. Plus, those annoyed people will ask, isn’t this an out-and-out gaming system? Surely it has no place in the sober environs of PC Pro? (Hopefully those same people won’t notice that we review two gaming laptops and a further two gaming PCs this month.)

Well, yes, I take your point. But allow me to nail my virtual colours to my virtual mast with a virtual flourish: VR is here and it’s here to stay. Don’t like it? Fine, don’t buy it. Nobody is going to force you to invest hundreds into a headset. But VR is carving out an important niche, and while gaming may be the driving force at the moment, its future goes way beyond first-person shooters.

I was about to write “a decade from now” followed by a bold prediction about VR’s invasion into healthcare and online shopping, but that’s dangerous. Who knows what the timescale will be? Who knows exactly what form it will take? What I’m absolutely confident of is that VR is a technology unlike any other. It grabs your attention in a way that we’ve never seen before, and while that means playing games now, in the future it could mean remote controlled surgery, a way to connect families across continents that will make Skype seem like two people yelling into a can, and whole new ways to make money.

This isn’t to say that I agree with HTC’s propaganda – sorry, marketing – around the Vive Pro, where it claims not to aim the Vive Pro at domestic users at all. This product, it declares, is for professionals developing VR environments. Hmm. I think the “Pro” moniker is more likely a justification for whacking such a big price onto it when the more basic Vive costs £500 with accessories. The main customers for the Vive Pro, I’m sure, won’t be design agencies but the same suckers – sorry, I mean us enthusiasts – who are always at the cutting edge of tech.

Naysayers will still say nay. VR, they’ll point out, has been on the cusp of breaking through for decades. “And look, up there!” they’ll shout. “You used the word ‘niche’. That’s all this is. A niche for people with too much money in their pockets and not enough sense in their heads.”

But there’s nothing wrong with niches. Computers were once in a niche. So were smartphones. And “success” doesn’t need to mean a VR headset in every home. In fact, the biggest problem for any nascent technology is the hazy definition of what success means. Perhaps VR will gain a stronghold in industry long before it appeals to the mainstream population. It might never even hit the mainstream in the same way as consoles, only appealing to an adventurous subsection of society.

Maybe you’ll be in that subsection. Maybe you won’t. But VR has landed, it’s compelling, and even if the HTC Vive Pro is way too expensive to be a big hit this Christmas, I’m convinced it’s the most important product we’ll review this year.