HTC Vive mounting bracket measurements & early game impressions

My HTC Vive arrived today, and after roughly 10 hours in VR I’m really impressed and quite tired. But I promised that I’d provide some mounting bracket measurements since I was annoyed a few days back that I couldn’t find anything reliable about that online.

Brackets measure as length 8.4 cm / width: 4.45 cm / depth: 3 mm (Where the screws pass through, slightly curved)

Mounting holes are symmetric and centered exactly 1 cm from the ends (6.4 cm center <-> center distance). Their diameter is 5 mm. The length of the included screws is exactly 4 cm (after the cap).

Bonus room setup process image:

Here are some very early and short (because I’m tired) impressions:

Overall, and this might be hard to believe, room scale VR with tracked controllers is just about as magical as you heard. I really did grin like mad simply by creating and popping a few balloons in the tutorial. And it obviously gets better from there.

The Lab:surprisingly polished and diverse, both graphically and in the types of gameplay demonstrated. My favourites were the archery game and Xortex (the bullet hell shooter). The interactivity in the lab itself was also amazing. Oh, and the trademark Valve  humor is there in robot repair and the calibration testing. I love the robot dog.

Space Pirate Trainer: it’s a very simple foundation, but despite the straightforward mechanics it actually seems to have a very significant stratification in terms of skill. I think it’s a game where, even at this early state, you can spend a lot of time playing and notice a continuing increase in your skill and accomplishments, which is always rewarding. Better anti-aliasing would be nice, it seemed a lot worse than all the other games I played today in that regard.

Water Bears VR: I got this for free in some promotion, and after the real physical exhaustion and sensory overload of Space Pirate Trainer (and Xortex in The Lab before it) we wanted to try something a bit more laid back. It’s a fun puzzle game with surprisingly good production values and very intuitive controls. It’s also really “complete”, unlike some of the other games which do feel like the early access titles that they are.
And the “Water Bears” (which you can interact with after completing each level) are extremely cute, so this is a game to show off to anyone enthralled by that.

Cloudlands VR Minigolf: it’s minigolf, in VR. Except the courses are often a lot more inventive than what you’d find in reality. The controls work very well after a small adjusting period, but the game is surprisingly challenging in how it sets the par for each hole. Room scale helps a lot here in being able to actually walk around the ball or get down on the ground and check the intended trajectory of a shot.

Audioshield: perhaps the game I was most hyped for, having played Audiosurf for over 400 hours. It does not disappoint. The best part was starting off with a random semi-obscure song (Dogfight by M.O.V.E.) and someone had already played it!

Anyway, I’ll probably be capable of more coherent thoughts later.

Also, by the way, I wrote a in-depth DS3 pc version technical analysis (good thing I completed that article before the Vive arrived!)