A lot of people ask us always the same kind of questions, like "What do your product offers more than HTC Vive?", "Why ImmotionRoom is different from HTC Vive?", "Aren’t Vive controllers better because you’ve got the haptic feedback?"…, so I’ve decided to write a post to actually explain why we’re better or worse than HTC Vive.

Actually, the title of this post is not completely true: ImmotionRoom CAN work with HTC Vive, so it’s not one against the other, but with the "vs." every title becomes automatically cooler, so I’ve written it like that :-)

What do we offer more than HTC Vive?

• You can see your body: with our system, thanks to Microsoft Kinect tracking, you can see the avatar of your whole body, while with Vive you can only see your hands (or VR controllers). You could say that this is not that much, but when we made people try ImmotionRoom at the WTT exhibition, we saw that the user is truly amazed by seeing his own body and that it gives him a great sense of presence.

• You can interact with your whole body: again, since you have your whole body, you can use it to interact with the surrounding virtual world: you can use your feet to kick objects (e.g. great for a fitness or soccer game), you can use the basin to dance, you can use all your arm in a fighting game. With Vive you’ve only hands and head.

• You can walk in a natural way: with ImmotionRoom, you walk in place to walk in the virtual world and this is a nausea-free and natural walking mechanic. With Vive you have to use teleportation, that breaks all the immersion magic. Actually, a somewhat-similar mechanic exists in some games for Vive, but involves you moving your hands to walk… and this is not that natural and surely blocks you from interacting with your hands while walking.

• You have hands free: no controllers, only your body! This is the same as for Vive, if you use Leap Motion.

• You can use any headset: our product is completely cross-device.

• You can go wireless: ImmotionRoom supports lots of different headsets, including wireless ones. So you can have your full body in virtual reality, with no cables. This is impossible for Vive.

OK, so, we’re really cool. But…

• Vive costs less. ImmotionRoom requires you to buy Kinect sensors and stuff and this is not cheap.

• Vive controllers give you haptic feedback: you can touch the Vive controllers and so have haptic feedback of what you’re doing. Since we use no controllers, we can’t provide this kind of important feedback.

• Vive is more precise: thanks to laser tracking of Lighthouses, it’s really precise; Kinect is more rough.

…but we’re working hard on these points!

Hope to have answered to these questions once for all. Vive is super-cool, but with ImmotionRoom it’s even better… ;)