You Won't Have To Wait For Valve's VR Headset

The HTC Vive has been on back-order since it released back at the beginning of April... until now. Valve and HTC recently made it known that supply orders are now catching up to the demand and the most you'll have to wait now is a couple of days for the headset to ship to your location.

Gamespot is reporting that the wait time for the HTC Vive has been brought all the way down to a couple of days, and those couple of days are simply for shipping.

Originally the $800 virtual reality device ran into manufacturing problems and caused a hold-up for those who had ordered the headset following the launch on April 5th. Everyone who had attempted to order the device after it launched ran into a problem of being put on a waiting list for the HTC Vive.

Valve and HTC weren't the only ones who ran into a problem with supplying consumers with the newest generation of virtual reality headsets. Oculus also ran into a problem with the supply of their Rift after launching at the end of March for $600. They're still having supply issues with the Rift, and they've been attempting to fulfill orders as the units are being made available, with some people having to wait up to two months for their units to be delivered, as reported by Road to VR.

With HTC and Valve getting the manufacturing issues sorted, it now gives them a huge leg up over the Oculus Rift in terms of supplying the headset to those really looking to take the dive into HD VR gaming and recreational productivity.

Even though the Oculus Rift has been the headset getting most of the media spotlight, the reality is that the pricier HTC Vive comes with more features right out of the box. Again, you get what you pay for and the higher premium for the Vive tends to show in what you get. For instance, the Vive allows for 3D spatial recognition using 10 x 10 real life space to render the user's position in the 3D world. The Vive's lighthouses enable for real life room recognition, which makes it more immersive when moving around in games.

The Vive also comes with two 3D space controllers that, enabling the Vive to recognize their positions relative to the user's hands. This means that hopefully at some point in the future we'll get a really good boxing game that makes full use of those controllers.

The Rift also has controllers with 3D space recognition, but they won't be available until sometime this summer. Some games like Roblox are already accounting for the new controllers and designing the software to support the hardware, even though it's not available yet.

The only major drawback for the Vive is that it's tethered with quite a few cables, making it a bit of a hazard for clumsy gamers and people who have a tendency to trip over cords. Of course, the other major drawback is the price. However, given how the delays are affecting the Rift at the moment, some consumers may have taken the time to simply save up an extra $200 and get a Vive instead since it's currently available and in stock again.