Cutting cords
Of the major virtual reality headsets that have come to market already, it’s the HTC Vive that many see as the strongest competitor. The Vive’s room-scale VR and touch controllers make for an explorative experience that’s tough to rival. The only issue is that kind of freedom requires a tangle of cords all around the player.
A Bulgarian tech company is trying to eliminate that problem. Quark VR says that it’s working with Valve to bring a wireless Vive to prototype sometime this fall. According to the press release, Quark is introducing a small transmitter that will communicate via Wi-Fi between the PC and the Vive. It sounds as if the transmitter can be attached to the headset or placed in the user’s pocket.
An obvious obstacle to this method is mitigating any sort of delay that comes from a wireless connection. Quark doesn’t say how it plans to address this, just that it will. “Getting the experience to feel seamless through Wi-Fi, keeping in mind the inevitable connection delay, was a huge challenge, but we’re getting extremely close to being able to show it in action,” Quark’s co-founder commented.
There’s no guarantee anything will ever come of Quark’s prototype. It could turn out that a wired connection is simply necessary for VR. But when sites are writing stories like “How to keep the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive cord out of your way,” we know there’s a fundamental design flaw. It’s good to know that someone’s working to fix that.
