Porsche Macan Turbo review: The SUV superstar

The Macan is the current “it” car of the SUV world. Since it appeared on our roads in 2014, demand has outstripped supply for Porsche’s newest model. Even now, order new and you’re likely looking at a nine month wait to get behind the wheel of your new car.

Even for the SUV haters of this world, it’s easy to see why: for its type, the Porsche Macan is impeccably designed; it’s the right size and price for many well-healed, small-family-in-tow buyers; and it has few real rivals – the Audi Q5 is of pensionable age, the BMW X3 is Bavaria at far from its dynamic best and the Range Rover Evoque is more about style than the dynamic performance that Porsche provides.

Think Porsche, and you think performance. But despite only introducing its first diesel engine (in the Cayenne) just a handful of years ago, in the Macan the biggest seller by some margin in the UK is a diesel model. With 255bhp on tap, the Macan Diesel S isn’t going to be shamed in the performance stakes, and is likely to deliver 40mpg on the run. It’s a sensible choice.

But here at Pocket-lint we’re not always sensible. So when Porsche said “would you like to try the Macan Turbo?” we couldn’t help ourselves but say “yes please”, let our hair down and live a little dangerously.

Porsche Macan review: Turbo with a capital T

In the Macan Turbo’s case – and just like the 911 – this is Turbo with a capital T. It’s not simply a lesser Macan engine with the dial turned up. The Turbo uses its own, all-new 3.6-litre petrol engine, to which not one but two turbos are strapped. It produces 394bhp, which – despite the Macan weighing 1,925kg – has quite a dramatic effect when you plant your foot on the accelerator pedal.

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The Turbo is one of those cars which, upon first acquaintance, you have go through a brain/driving recalibration exercise. Because if you’ve just jumped out of a “normal” car before driving this you’ll instinctively use too much accelerator pedal.

That means in town you’ll end up rushing up behind other cars quite quickly, accentuating the misnomer that all Porsche SUVs are driven aggressively. So you have to adjust your brain, trying to keep the thing on a leash, marvelling at the super quick changes of the 7-speed PDK gearbox as you pootle around town (wondering why it’s so hard to adjust the climate control given this is a car only designed a couple of years ago) wincing at the computer telling you you’re doing 16mpg.

Porsche Macan review: Open road

Get the Macan out of the city, though, and the experience transforms. Hey, it’s not that it’s bad in the urban jungle – just that it feels caged. But on the open, well-sighted roads of Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire, the Macan was in its element. Road holding, handling and body roll are in a different league to any other SUV you can mention. Which is to say fantastically better. Out here, the Macan turns into a hot hatch. You completely forget you’re sat several inches higher off the ground.

And the 394bhp makes light work of traffic. You come up behind trucks, find yourself wondering whether you’ve the space and time to pass, but then just plant your foot and before any doubt has begun to enter your mind, you’ve passed.

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Pity the engine doesn’t sound a bit more aurally exciting when you do extend it though. Nonetheless, the Macan Turbo always feels muscular and rapid in a straight line – and stable and dynamically able in a curved one. Thank the Porsche Torque Vectoring Plus (PVT Plus; a £1,012 option), Air Suspension with self-levelling ride height, and PASM (£1,004) for that.

Given that all of this suspension and drive-train technology gives you the ability to pilot a near two-tonne SUV like a much smaller and lighter car, we regularly found ourselves travelling faster than we should have – so brakes are important too. Porsche brakes tend to be the best in the business, but our car gilded the lily with the optional Carbon Ceramic Composite setup. As an eye-watering £5,463 extra, they’re something we suspect most Macan owners will skip over. But the brakes do – once up to heat – provide you with absolutely incredible stopping power, plus the ability to use very little of the pedal travel in order to scrub off great chunks of speed.

Porsche also delivers an object lesson in how to setup a car with big wheels. Our Macan rode on 21-inch numbers with a slither of tyre rubber wrapped around them. But it never drives harsh or crashy – even over speedbumps it’s not unpleasant. Good job, because in our view you’ll need to have your Macan on at least 20-inch wheels to make it look the part.

All told, Porsche has performed magic, really: making a heavy, high-riding SUV drive as well as though it’s a sports car is an impressive feat. But it’s one the engineering team has nailed.

Porsche Macan review: Big red Porsche

Whether you’d be so impressed if someone parked a red Porsche on your drive is another matter. The Macan is – from an automotive design perspective – impeccably resolved, and beautifully detailed. The clamshell bonnet alone is a feat of immense technical achievement, it’s very hard to stamp a single piece of metal this big and stop it rippling or doing odd things, while also maintaining tight, consistent shut lines with the other panels that join up to it.

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But whether the Macan’s curves are best shown off in a colour known as “Impulse Red”, we’re not so sure. A quick Facebook poll revealed an interesting and unusual response – with our male friends tending to like the “Maroon Red” shade, while our female friends laughed at “the big pink Porsche”.

We think we’d take our Macan in a nice, subtle shade of dark blue. But whichever colour your choose, it isn’t a car you’d call ugly. Only the un-interrupted boot-lid surfacing annoyed us – as it means there’s no handle or button to pull or press to get the boot open if you’ve not got the key in your hand. It electrically opens and shuts as standard though, as perhaps you might expect of a car at this level.

What you might be surprised at is that Porsche make you pay extra for heated seats (£259), Bluetooth connectivity (£271) and a reversing camera (£332). However, 18-way electronically-adjustable leather seats, a 14-speaker Bose sound system and satnav all come as standard, so Porsche doesn’t make you pay for absolutely every tech nicety. Were it our Macan, we’d stick with a 20-inch wheel upgrade, grin and bear having to pay for the essential Bluetooth, and add the Sports Chrono pack and PTV Plus because it widens the dynamic envelope.

Porsche Macan review: Interface complexity

Porsche is unique in its approach to interface design, mixing both a touchscreen (which most manufacturers have used as an excuse to bin physical buttons) with a rash of physical controls on the console, which flank the gear-shifter.

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As technology and gadget nerds, we find it increasingly difficult to report on car interfaces in a measured way. We love gadgets, but we think most in-car interfaces are poorly designed. They have different operating parameters to smartphones and apps – but is that really an excuse for slow responding screens, that aren’t particularly intuitive, having typically bad on-screen graphics? We don’t think so – but it’s not just a Porsche issue.

In this light, the Macan’s interface isn’t as good as a car costing £60K really ought to be (well, 72K all-in in this upgraded guise). But it is better than many in-car interfaces today. The centre screen is relatively low set which means your eyes are looking a long way down off the road to take it in.

However, that’s made up for by the gear-shifter being situated such that it provides a handy wrist-rest for your hand as it operates the screen. The buttons and menus aren’t particularly modern, though, but the buttons are big and the menu logic is generally sound. The climate buttons are also physical – which we like – although they’re quite hard to use at times, given their placement.

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What makes it all work rather nicely – from the driver’s point of view at least – is the digital screen that is the third dial in the gauge cluster. You operate this via a scroll-wheel and button on the steering wheel, which is highly intuitive to use: simply scroll through menus, press the scroll to click into a function, then hit the button to come back out of it. It allows you to pull up vehicle data, satnav map, turn-by-turn, radio, phonebook and more. It’s one of the car’s best features.

Verdict

When Porsche first made an SUV – the Cayenne – the purists said it would ruin the brand. Instead, Porsche pulled off the enviable feat of building a car that earned it the profits which make the sports car range continually viable, give many customers exactly what they want and which drive better than any SUV rivals.

The Macan very much fits this mould. You might not like what it says, or is, but it’s a car which is popular for a reason. It’s practical too: the boot swallowed all our small family clobber, it’s fun to drive, it’s wears the right badge and at £60,994 for this Turbo model in standard form, it really doesn’t represent bad value.

It’s a shame Porsche charge extra for features such as Bluetooth, that the twin-turbo V6 engine doesn’t sound a bit more exciting, or that the interface has a degree of complexity that takes some acclimatising. But as far as gripes go, that’s literally all we got.

The fact the Macan Turbo also offers the ability to achieve 35mpg out of town makes it a remarkable feat of engineering. And the good news is that you don’t need the Turbo model to enjoy its blend of capabilities. Little wonder that, more than 18-months after it was introduced, the Macan is a car that Porsche cannot build fast enough. It’s worth the wait.

BlackBerry abandoned by WhatsApp, beginning of the end for BB10?

WhatsApp has announced that it will be stopping support for certain operating systems including BlackBerry’s BB10 OS.

WhatsApp has said that it will stop supporting certain operating systems as it wants to focus on those used by the majority of people.

While the plan is to remove support and updates for legacy systems like Nokia Symbian S60 or Windows Phone 7.1, the BlackBerry OS is still in use.

BlackBerry launched BB10 in January 2013 and is still running and updating the OS on its smartphones. This is used by less than 1 per cent of the smartphone market.

After BlackBerry released its Priv smartphone running Android it was suggested that BB10 may be abandoned. However BlackBerry responded, in a statement to Pocket-lint, to clarify that it would still support BB10:

“Consumer and enterprise fans of our workhorse BlackBerry 10 smartphones such as Passport, Classic and others can look forward to multiple security and privacy enhancements in 2016.”

Now that Facebook owned WhatsApp has lumped BB10 in with defunct operating systems it suggests there may be more to the situation. Of course it could simply be that lack of BB10 use which doesn’t justify developmental time to offer further support.

READ: BlackBerry appears to be going Android only, say goodbye to BB10 

What is Sky Q Fluid Viewing and how do I get it?

Now that Sky is heavily advertising its new TV system, Sky Q, we’ve had many questions about what it offers.

There are lots of components to the Sky Q system, with a main box – either Sky Q Silver or Sky Q box – and separate Sky Q Mini boxes for other rooms. There is also a new Sky Q Hub broadband router, and we explain what everything does in considerable depth in our main “What is Sky Q?” feature.

We are also often asked what Sky Q offers that is different to the existing Sky+HD or Now TV options, and we’ve answered those questions in our head-to-head comparison, “Now TV vs Sky+HD vs Sky Q: Which Sky package is right for you?”

We’ve even spent some time with the new Sky Q kit to bring you our opinions ahead of a full, in-depth review.

But one question that gets asked a lot that directly springs from the marketing of Sky Q is, “What is Fluid Viewing?”

That’s why we’ve put together this quick and handy guide that explains the concept of Fluid Viewing and why Sky is using it to describe Sky Q.

What does the Sky Q Fluid Viewing advert mean?

From the very beginning, starting at the Sky Q announcement event last year, Sky has described the main selling point of the new system as “Fluid Viewing”. It also uses the term on its websites and, most significantly, in its TV advertising.

The adverts even render the concept visually, showing liquid coming out of one TV, travelling through a house, and entering another TV or device. It’s arty, but really doesn’t explain things that well – especially when the full ad is truncated down to 30 or even 10 seconds.

To be fair to Sky and its ad agency though, it’s hard to represent Sky Q’s talents without running a simple, dull presentation of “if you press something here, it does something there. And then you can do something like this here”. How can that compete with shiny globules of molten entertainment blobbing their way around your carpets?

In an esoteric way, the blobs do represent the idea of Fluid Viewing well, in that something watched in one room can be switched to another. It just tells a small part of the story.

What is Sky Q Fluid Viewing?

So now down to the technology the ad tried to represent. Fluid Viewing is the term Sky uses for watching content on one device and then picking it up on another.

That’s it in a nutshell really. Although it’s actually a lot neater than that sounds.

A typical Sky Q system has a main box featuring multiple TV tuners – either the Sky Q Silver box with 12 TV tuners or the standard Sky Q box with eight. You will then likely have one or two Sky Q Mini boxes set up in other rooms, which don’t have their own tuners but work exactly like a main Sky Q box by linking to it and streaming video (even recordings) over a home network connection.

A Sky Q app is also available for iPad and Android tablets that works similarly to the main Sky Q experience, even giving you the ability to download and watch your recordings when on your travels.

Fluid Viewing means that shows and movies can be watched on any of these devices at any time, with each picking up where the last left off.

For example, you can watch The Avengers: Age of Ultron in the living room on the main box, switch it off, and continue the film exactly where you left off on a tablet or Sky Q Mini box. Even recordings that are left uncompleted can be picked up again from the last moment when downloaded onto a tablet.

Hasn’t Fluid Viewing been available on other services before?

Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video have offered a similar feature for some time, where you can pause a programme or film on a TV app, say, and carry on watching it on another device. However, that doesn’t include personal recordings, just content streamed over the internet.

Also, Sky has trademarked the term “Fluid Viewing” so it is unique to Sky Q.

Can I get Fluid Viewing on my existing Sky+HD box?

Sadly, the pick-it-up-wherever feature is unique to Sky Q for now. It requires a stable, highly-spec’ed ecosystem rather than just the one box and a separate Sky Go app. You’ll have to upgrade to Sky Q for the full-on feature.

How much is Sky Q and Fluid Viewing?

Sky Q is now available from Sky’s own online store.

As an existing subscriber, you will have already received details on how you can upgrade, with Sky saying that it costs a one-off fee for the hardware, with packages charged at around £12 a month over your existing Sky+HD monthly fee.

There are also different, full pricing details for new customers.

There are two packages available for new customers, one that features a Sky Q or Sky Q Silver box and access to 300+ TV channels. That costs £42 a month.

The other package costs £54 a month, has the same channels but includes a Sky Q Silver box and a Sky Q Mini box.

You can also choose to add Sky Movies for an extra £17 a month or Sky Sports for an extra £25.50 a month. Adding both will set you back an extra £34.50 a month (so at a discount).

The one-off fees for the hardware break down as follows:

If you take the £42 a month Sky Q bundle with Sky Broadband, Sky Movies or Sky Sports, you can get the Sky Q box for £99. The Sky Q Silver box as part of that bundle costs £149.

If you take the Sky Q Silver TV bundle at £54 a month, you can get the Sky Q Silver box and a Sky Q Mini box combined for £99.

If you don’t take Sky Broadband, Movies or Sports, you must pay £249 for the Sky Q box or £299 for the Silver box as part of the £42 a month bundle.

The hardware for the £54 a month bundle, when taken without the other Sky add-ons, will cost a combined £299.

Extra Sky Q Mini boxes will cost £99 each.

There is also an installation cost of £50.

A Sky Q Hub router doesn’t cost any extra when taken with Sky Broadband or, for existing customers, when upgrading to Sky Q.

To find out more about Sky Q, Fluid Viewing and how to order it, you can visit Sky’s dedicated page at sky.com/skyq.

READ: What is Sky Q, how much does it cost and how can I get it?

Moth eyes inspire solar cells that work indoors

As a rule, most solar cells need to catch direct sunlight. Even those that work indoors can only do so much to generate power from artificial light sources. However, British researchers have found a clever (and decidedly) unusual way to harvest energy while inside: by imitating moths. They’ve created a graphene-based material that traps electromagnetic waves much like a moth’s eye, making it one of the most energy-absorbent substances to date. With the right antennas, it could produce energy from not just sunlight, but any device that emits microwave or radio waves — your smartphone could help power your smartwatch.

The challenge is getting all the pieces to fall into place. The necessary antennas (which convert electromagnetism into usable electricity) aren’t nearly as well-developed as they should be. Still, it’s a start toward a future of widespread green power. Besides, it shows that even seeming pests have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Via: Newsweek

Source: Science Advances

Netflix steps up proxy blocking to celebrate Oscars weekend

What else gets you in the inclusionary spirit of the Oscars like your favorite streaming service blocking you from accessing it? That’s the reality many woke to this weekend when Netflix stepped up its efforts to block those using VPNs and other region unlocks from viewing shows and movies.

While Netflix has been slowly blocking VPNs and DNS workarounds over the past couple of months — Australia was first to feel the pinch — this weekend has seen a slew of complaints from around Europe. Users in Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic and the UK have all reported being blocked. Anecdotally, Engadget writers have seen access revoked for using a VPN that doesn’t actually “change” locations — a UK-based VPN while in the UK, for example.

An error shown while attempting to watch Netflix on a UK VPN from the UK.

It seems like if you’re using a VPN or DNS region changer, your days watching Netflix are numbered. The service says it’s implementing the blocks due to the “historic practice of licensing content by geographic territories,” shifting the blame to the movie and TV industry. However, given that the changes also affect viewers who are merely using a VPN for privacy or work reasons, it’s drawing ire from a wider audience than necessary.

Via: Reddit

Snapchat Stories come to the browser with Oscars roundup

Snapchat is immensely popular, but at the moment its plentiful Snaps and stitched Stories are trapped inside the mobile app. If you’re on a laptop or PC, or want to share a Snap on another social network, there’s no obvious way of doing so. That state of affairs started to change last night, however, when Snapchat slapped a live Story up on its website. It meant anyone could get a taste of what people were posting at the event, including, perhaps most importantly, people that aren’t already on Snapchat.

At the time of writing the curated Story is still accessible, so you can click through and see all of the vertical videos — in typical Snapchat fashion, plastered with captions and filters — from the red carpet. The implementation could be a one-off, but we wouldn’t be surprised if Snapchat replicated this format for other live events. Who knows, it could eventually lead to full-blown profile pages and embeddable Snaps, similar to Vine, Instagram and other mobile-first video-sharing platforms.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Snapchat

Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Trademark Extended to Apple Watch, iPad, Siri, and More

Apple has updated its “Think Different” trademark in a new European Patent and Trademark Office filing, covering it for use across the company’s growing line of products.

The filing expands the International Classes to which the trademark can be applied from one to eight. Those classes now cover Apple Watch, Apple Pay, Apple Pencil, iPad, games, business management, subscription services, telecommunications, broadcasting, music, television, educational services, and Siri.

Originally filed on February 24, the update is the first time Apple has amended the trademark since 2009, when the iPod was added to its classes, reports Patently Apple.

The slogan first appeared in Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” ad campaign, marking Steve Jobs’ return to the company after leaving in 1985. The trademark, widely assumed to be a response to IBM’s motto “Think”, continued to feature in Apple TV and print ads up to the launch of the iMac G4 in 2002, but has not appeared since.

It remains to be seen whether the filing marks a return of the slogan’s use in future Apple ad campaigns, or is simply a preventative measure to stop other companies adopting the phrase.

Tag: patentlyapple.com
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New Raspberry Pi 3 Model B brings super specs while still barely denting your wallet

The English made Raspberry Pi has reached the third numerical iteration of its builds and with that it’s become more powerful than ever, while remaining affordable.

The new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is still physically tiny at little bigger than a credit card in area size. Despite the compact build it crams in top specs to power it along, whatever the task it’s applied to.

The Rapberry Pi 3 comes with a 1.2GHz quad-core Broadcom BCM2387 CPU and dual-core VideoCore IV GPU all backed by 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM and a microSD card slot for storage.

Rather excitingly, when it comes to connectivity and the Internet of Things, the Pi 3 sports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1 Classic and LE.

For those wishing to push out some decent graphics from the mini Pi there won’t be disappointment as it supports Open GL ES 2.0. That means hardware accelerated OpenVG, or to get technical, 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.

You’ll get plenty of wired connection options including 10/100 Ethernet, HDMI out, 3.5mm audio out, HDMI, four USB 2.0 connector a 15-pin MIPI Camera Serial Interface, 40-pin 2.54mm expansion header plus a Display Serial Interface.

All that and the Raspberry Pi 3 is priced at $35, which is around £25.

READ: What is Sky Q, how much does it cost and how can I get it?

HTC Vive UK pricing revealed and you’re not going to like it

HTC has revealed the official UK release date and pricing for its HTC Vive virtual reality system and we have to admit that it provoked a sharp intake of breath.

During Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, the company announced that the entire HTC Vive consumer set, which includes the headset, two motion controllers, two sensors and a microphone, would retail for $799 in the US.

HTC also told us that UK pricing would be directly comparable. That’s why we’re a little shocked at the final set fee of £689.

Taxes and import fees are no doubt significant reasons for that pricing, but it does make us wonder who will be willing to shell out such a lofty sum for a virtual reality headset – even if it does come with more bells and whistles than competing devices?

READ: HTC Vive preview: An experience that’s out of this world

HTC also revealed that, with pre-orders for the package starting today, 29 February, units are expected to ship for a 5 April release date.

Another announcement that might sweeten the deal is that three fully-fledged VR experiences will be bundled with the HTC Vive for a limited time.

Tilt Brush is a 3D painting utility that we’ve tried ourselves several times. Designed by Google, it enables you to smear paint all around you, which hangs in mid-air. It’s great fun and impressive.

Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives is a fun and silly game in which you must take part in different jobs to hilarious effect.

Lastly, Fantastic Contraption gives you a playing field in which to build machines and vehicles in a 3D space.

HTC Vive preview: An experience that’s out of this world

After years of betas, prototypes and demos, virtual reality is here. There are five main ways to enjoy virtual reality – or VR – at the moment. Each device is aimed at different markets, with a variety of different prices to suit different budgets, all the way from HTC Vive down to Google Cardboard.

HTC Vive sits at the top of the VR tree, above Oculus Rift in terms of what you can do out of the box. Both devices need a powerful PC to run them rather than a console or mobile phone, however Vive supports full movement within a specific space, offering a more comprehensive range of possibilities than many other units.

We’ve been plotting the growth and development of HTC Vive from way before our first play at the MWC 2015 reveal in Barcelona up to the present day, with numerous demos in-between. We’ve climbed Everest, explored shipwrecks, and picked out supercars all from the comfort of a demo room.

So is HTC Vive something to be excited about? We’ve spent a lot of time with HTC Vive in all its guises so far.  

HTC Vive hardware

The HTC Vive can be broken down into three distinct bits of hardware: The headset, the controllers, and the motion tracking sensors you place in the corner of the rooms. Outside the headset you will also need a PC to be able to run the software, as with out, the HTC Vive is really just a glorified hat. 

HTC Vive headset

Looking like a giant scuba diving mask, the virtual reality headset is worn over the face to fully immerse you. There is no glass to see out of, and the device holds in place via a hefty strap that you wear over your head. The headband, more akin to a gas mask fitting rather than skiing goggles, is very comfortable and reduces some of the front weighting of the unit.

The foam gasket is interchangeable, allowing you to change it to suit different heads, or those who wear glasses. Having experienced it first hand, we can confirm it is on the whole comfortable to wear, although we would be interested to see how we felt after more than 30 minutes, our longest VR stint so far.

Part of the comfort in the latest design is a result of the headset being made considerably smaller and curvier than early editions, as well as adding new features like a camera, so that users can see the actual world while they are in a virtual one. In practice and we found it takes away some of the isolation that VR headsets bring with them.

Rather than display a live video feed through this camera, HTC Vive gives you a more of a “Predator” heat map interface. It takes you out of the game world, but not completely. It meant that in our demo we knew where to pose for the camera – something we’ve not been able to do in early versions of the headset – and enables a greater realisation of the world beyond the virtual playground you’re in. That means you’ll be able to see objects in the room too, like the chair you’re trying to sit in.

Key to the experience is the display, and although HTC aren’t fully detailing it at present, the company has confirmed that it has updated the screens from the original developer build. The latest iteration is brighter and crisper than before and features something called “mura” correction (from Japanese?) which deals with unevenness, irregularity, lack of uniformity, nonuniformity and inequality. It is the same technology that is used by some television manufacturers in their high-end TV sets.

One of the things we’ve noticed in all our testing is how smooth the experience is. Graphically there’s no sign of lag, no delay as you move your head, hands or body. The display runs at 90fps, which should keep it all clear visually. There’s no flicker and the headset is pretty comfortable too, with the soundtrack being completely enveloping – you simply plug in a separate pair of headphones that you supply.

In many of the demos we’ve almost forgotten that we’re wearing the demo rig – that’s how immersive the experience is, aside from the single bundle of wires that hang out the back of the headset to connect to your PC. HTC Vive headset has an umbilical cord of cables coming out of the back that can be cumbersome at times, and while it is a vast improvement on what we experienced in early versions, it’s currently an inescapable constant.

The entire headset is scattered with familiar motion tracking points, meaning the rest of the Vive system can see exactly where the headset is, how it’s moving, whether you’re looking up, down left or right and so on. We’ve talked about motion tracking a little more below.

HTC says it is continuing to work alongside Steam to create the best VR headset it can, regardless of price, so we suspect refinement to continue up until launch.

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HTC Vive controller

The HTC Vive controllers have the same motion tracking that the headset does, meaning you always know where your hands are – you can see them, if they are hands, so they can play an integral part in the Vive visual experience, as well as providing a control interface.

The Vive controllers are well balanced, come with 4-hour battery life, and have a number of buttons. There is a trigger that’s operated with a squeeze of your hands, and the controller features dual stage trigger support that works like the shutter button on a DSLR. A light squeeze and you can lock on to a target, a tighter squeeze fires.

There is a circular sensitive pad on the top that you can use your thumbs to control, as well as a selection of other buttons. It feels natural and it is versatile, and more importantly easy to use without your eyes. The main “home” button is inset so you can find it quickly, while there is plenty of rough and smooth texture contrast to help your fingers find where they are too.  

That said, we would still like more emphasis of the all-important home button, and a more textured back panel for better grip. We are sure though with continual use the button location will become as familiar to us as the Dual Shock controller on the PS4 is.

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HTC Vive motion tracking sensors

The HTC Vive lets you walk around the room by being able to map your every move. To do that you have to have two small base stations in two corners of the room you are planning on using.

The small black boxes are minimalist, wireless, and about the size of couple of packs of playing cards stacked on top of each other. Mounted up high on a wall bracket once installed you can forget about them.

These base stations contain the lasers, and when mounted on the walls, transect the whole space. The Vive headset and controllers are covered with detection points, so they know exactly where they are within that space. That sort of 3D motion mapping isn’t a new technology – it’s similar to how Hollywood captures movement that then underpins CGI models in blockbuster movies.

But here it is used to let you roam in Vive’s “full room scale” virtual reality, meaning you have more freedoms than before. You can sit, stand, kneel, walk, jump, bob, weave, punch, skip, spin, dip, dive, duck, and dodge, as well as probably stand on your head, and Vive knows what you’re doing and where you’re doing it.

This makes it different to most of the other systems that offer a seated or static experience: HTC Vive is going to be about getting up, moving around and getting more involved.

This room mapping is also there to stop you walking into your walls if you get too immersed int the experience. Walk towards the outward perimeter and a blue grid softly appears in front of you.

That’s Vive telling you where the wall is, and akin to hitting the edge of the arena in The Hunger Games or the edge of the Holodeck in Star Trek. This is where the matrix ends. If you keep walking, you hit the wall. It’s as simple as that.

HTC Vive release date and price

If all that kit sounds expensive, that’s because HTC Vive is. It costs $799 in the US, £689 in the UK. But for that you get a whole load of kit in the box, not just the headset.

READ: HTC Vive UK pricing revealed and you’re not going to like it

Vive comes with the headset, two controllers, a microphone, two room sensors and all the connections and cables to hook it up to a high-end PC.

That is a lot pricier than the Oculus Rift, its main rival, which costs $600 (£500), but you do get more for the money. You also get three VR experiences bundled for free, for a limited period: Google’s Tilt Brush, Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives, and Fantastic Contraption.

HTC opened its pre-order process for the Vive virtual reality headset on 29 February. It will ship on 5 April.

HTC Vive PC requirements

Now that pre-orders have opened for the consumer model of HTC Vive, the company has revealed what kind of PC you ideally need to run the device at its best.

Many of the experiences might require less than the following high-end recommendations, but if you really want to make the most of your swanky, new VR headset, these are the specifications you should match in your computer:

• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or better
• CPU: Intel i5-4590, AMD FX 8350 equivalent or better
• RAM: 4 GB or more
• Video Output: HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2 or newer
• USB Port: 1x USB 2.0 or better port
• Operating System: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1 or later, Windows 10

HTC Vive games and content

HTC Vive: The open world

Turn on Vive and you are instantly presented with a futuristic polygonal landscape stretching off over the horizon. There are some buildings a long way off and the shape of the ground keeps shifting around us.

It briefly reminds us of an Inception dreamscape, before we are asked to press a couple of buttons and a balloon appears out of the controller in front of us. This open world is a holding pattern designed to allow you to load further content. Think of it as the menu interface on your Xbox One, but merely in an environment that is three dimensional and that you can walk around.

From here you can load further content. HTC and Steam haven’t confirmed what software will be bundled with the final consumer ready units, but over the last year we’ve experienced plenty showcased either by HTC themselves, or other developers keen to show off what they’ve been able to create with the hardware already.

Here’s a range of the experiences that HTC Vive has taken us through in the many demos that we’ve had.

WEVR

HTC Vive: Blu:Encounter

“Next, I’m going to take you deep underwater,” a voice says quietly out of the tranquil darkness we’re standing in. Our ears tell us we’re underwater a fraction before the scene appears around us. “You’re standing on the deck of a sunken wreck.” 

We look tentatively around the wreck’s foredeck. The waters are crystal clear and far above us we can see the sun’s broken rays refracting through the waters. There’s a blissful tranquillity, a sense of calm, as we gaze through scene surrounding us. The wonderfully enveloping soundscape matches the visual depths. 

There’s a rail at the edge of the deck and we take a few steps towards it. Small clusters of fish scatter as we move. We reach out to grab some, but they dart away, the light glistening off their scales as they slip through the water.

As we look over the railing, we’re hit with a real sense of vertigo. With a sharp intake of breath, we look into the inky blackness of the depths beneath us, quickly stepping back from the edge.

There is no ship, no railing. The vastness of the whale that glides up isn’t real, but neither are there words to describe its scale as we turn around to look behind us.

But the vertigo is real. The emerging sense of wonder is real. The total immersion we’re fooled into believing is real. The feeling that the Blu:Encounter from WEVR is giving us a VR experience like nothing we’ve ever seen before is very real indeed.

HTC Vive: TiltBrush

TiltBrush is a painting demo which has been seen before in VR on Oculus and Cardboard but now appears here in a new format. It is one of three titles HTC is giving away with purchases of the Vive for an initial, limited period.

The experience gives you the chance to really put your hand controls to the test. Using the top pad of the right controller we can change the thickness of the painting tool we’re using.

A squeeze of the trigger and there’s a green light line painted as we scribble around. The left hand is much more exciting, however. A touch of the top pad and we’re looking at our tool palette, but it’s a carousel that rotates around our hand, letting us pick colours and tools. It’s ultra futuristic, like a holographic wrist tool.

It’s a special day when you get to paint your own rainbow across the sky. That compounds another eureka moment. We walk under our own rainbow and look at it from the other side. It’s painted in a 3D world, the boundaries of two dimensions don’t apply. We’re giggling as we fill the room with colour, and walk around to inspect our handiwork from all sides. It’s not art, but it is fun and it gets us thinking creatively.

Vertigo Games

HTC Vive: Arizona Sunshine

The zombie apocalypse is on us, and this time it’s in room scale virtual reality. That’s the premise of Arizona Sunshine. The game is a fully immersive virtual reality experience, and immersive beyond your imagination.

The premise is simple. You are holed up in various settings with zombies charging towards you from all directions. All you’ve got to do is shoot them before they get to you.

With an array of weapons, and a constant fear that a zombie is about to creep up behind you, this is certainly one for making you spin around on the spot lots of times.

It’s also a demo that shows some of the limitations of the Vive system, although you can walk around, the mechanics of that room confinement means you always have to be in a designated space, whether that’s with walls or with rocks. That said Arizona Sunshine is a blast.

HTC Vive: McLaren showroom

Created by Nurulize, this demo allows people to see their customised McLaren before they sign on the dotted line. The demo is all about “object desire”, and like the Audi demo we’ve tried is all about seeing it as if it was in the room with you.

There are some jarring elements – like how you can’t touch the car, can’t open its doors, or can merely walk through it as if you are a ghost – but you can do things like sit inside it.

It is something we found ourselves doing almost without thinking about it. And yes, we realise that to anyone watching we must have looked stupid sitting on the floor in an empty room in a make-believe car, all so we could get a better feel of what the visibility out of the windscreen would be.

You could easily see car showrooms having a setup complete with a car seat to sit on to get the full experience.

Pocket-lint

HTC Vive: Audi 3D configurator

We’re on the hip Left Bank of the Seine River in Paris. It’s a sunny, breezy spring morning and you’re staring into the engine bay of your brand new, Ara Blue Audi R8 V10 Plus. As you move around the side of the car, you can’t help but wonder if you shouldn’t have got that split side blade in Matt Titanium Grey instead of Mythos Black.

Wonder no more. A wave of your hand and the side blades are re-rendered in the Titanium. Much better, now let’s go the whole hog and add 20-inch 10-spoke Y design alloys too. But hang on, do they clash if we get them in gloss anthracite…?

Soon, this fantastical world of kid-in-a-sweet shop car configuration will be available in a select handful of Audi brand stores. Virtual reality is the very latest way to allow the company’s customers to configure their cars, thanks to Vive.

Having already teemed up with Oculus in some stores to allow a first-gen VR configurator, Audi is now getting together with HTC and using the Vive for its next step on in the world of virtual configurators.

But why? Audi currently has – if you include variants – something like 52 models for sale. More car customers are shopping online. Big, out of town dealers aren’t places people love visiting, even if they’re architectural shrines to steel and glass, and serve decent coffee as Audi dealers tend to be. City centre brand stores are the way forward. The chances of a dealer having the car you’re shopping for in stock is actually decreasing. So how do you serve someone who walks in and has decided online that, yes, they’d very much like to spend £119k on a new R8, but needs to see if they like it better in grey or orange before ordering? Or can’t decide if they want a red or stone coloured interior. And just what those carbon trim options might do to change the cabin ambience.

VR is opening up opportunities for Audi to help the customer decide on these things, without needing to keep literally hundreds of thousands of pounds of cars in stock. Today, even if they kept one of every model at each dealer, they could never hope to showcase the myriad options modern premium cars offer, and which form such a critical part of the shopping experience.

With the Vive system, Audi can allow the customer to view the car just about anywhere. We checked out a Red R8 on the moon, which was a little surreal, but ultimately quite cool. The rendering engine and power of the technology means the car looks absolutely realistic: shadows, light, pressing of the metal all crisply rendered. And when you move your head to look around, no jerkiness. You can even crouch down and look right into the jewel like detail of the headlights.

A swipe of the iPad screen that your Audi assistant will be carrying, and his hand to guide you to sit down onto the bench, and you’ll be transported from outside the car to being sat in the driver’s seat, able to look around the interior and even lean in to get a closer view of details, materials, trim finishers.

Back to that Paris street, and the coolest part of the entire demo. Open the rear engine bay cover, and lean over to peer into the engine. As your nose approaches the virtual cam cover, the VR image changes from fully rendered, to holographic orange. Continue to dip your head and you’re now descending through a holographic engine. A valve, into the engine’s cylinders and a full inside tour of the internals of that utterly magnificent, high-revving V10. 

HTC Vive: Elite: Dangerous

Virtual reality experiences work very well when you are in confined space, and this demo is completely from the perspective of you sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship. It doesn’t use the room tracking element of Vive at all, but still delivers a very good virtual reality experience.

Like the game, already available, you command a spaceship flying around the galaxy selling, trading, and fighting your way out of trouble.

The gameplay is enhanced by the fact that you can look around within the cockpit to see what’s going on and where those bogies actually are. As you can imagine banking hard left and looking up and behind you can be quiet nauseous, but that merely adds to the experience rather than take away from it.

Elite: Dangerous is probably the most “traditional” game experience we’ve played on the Vive to date, complete with pilot controllers. Although it lives up to the VR experience promised, it doesn’t show off Vive’s full potential.  

HTC Vive: Aperture

Aperture, created by Valve, sees you in a workshop, being given instructions. They are pretty fast and we’re wondering if something is going wrong. We open the door and Atlas, the robot from Portal 2, staggers in. It’s time to run some repairs. 

With a swipe of the hand, Atlas expands into an exploded component view across the room in front of you. It’s incredibly detailed as you try to figure out how to repair the damaged robot. The instructions keep coming so fast that you have no idea what’s been said. It’s exhilarating, it’s confusing, we’re lost in Valve’s world, puppets on a virtual string.

It’s this use of existing and familiar characters that has us excited, especially when you’re pairing the IP that Valve has, with a system that’s so capable and dynamic from HTC.

Pocket-lint

HTC Vive: Climbing Everest

Perhaps the most exciting demo we have experienced so far is called Everest. Created by Iceland-based Solfar Studios in partnership with Nordic’s leading visual effects and animation house, the experience starts with you floating above the world’s highest mountain. The computer-generated scenery is breathtaking.

For this demo, presented to us by Nvidia, the company took the immersive angle way beyond what you can expect to get in the box. Nvidia chilled the demo room, so much so we had to put on a heavy winter mountain jacket to keep warm, and the company added a wind machine to give us more reason to believe we aren’t in London.

It works. For a moment, we found ourselves stumbling for balance, as we struggled to take it all in. The cool air, the wind in our face, and the crisp visuals all worked to trick our brain – even just a spilt second – into believing we were somewhere else. This is visual stimulus on another level.

The demo, which lasted around 10 minutes, had us crossing a crevasse by holding on to a guide rope before climbing a ladder to get to the top. It was very good, but it does highlight an area for improvement: tracking your feet.

While the controllers can be replicated to look like gloves or guns or paint brushes, VR doesn’t track any other part of your body at the moment. Look down, especially when you’re crossing a crevasse that in real life would have your heart racing, and you see nothing. It breaks the continuity of it all.

We are sure this could be solved with tracking stickers to pin to your shoes, but it is certainly something that brings you back to reality rather than allowing you to stay in the virtual world that little bit longer.

At the summit, all that was left to do was stare out across the huge vista knowing that we can now tick it off our list of things to see, even though we know we’ll never actually summit Everest.

Nu Reality

HTC Vive: Buying a kitchen

Another demo we’ve experienced is the ability to walk around a family room in an imaginary house. The Vive supports movement so walking around a room like a kitchen or out on to a veranda is really easy.

As with the car experience, we can easily see this being offered by architects, interior or lighting designers. It will give you the chance to see how something will look in your house before you build it. Forget model making, you’ll be able to walk around and see it first hand.

While this demo still has a “computer feel” to it when it comes to graphics, we can see this getting better over time. We expect that – within a couple of years – designing and buying a kitchen will involve donning a VR headset and walking around a virtual room instead of looking at some 3D CAD drawings on an ageing PC in a DIY superstore.

HTC Vive: A boring day at the office

Clearly designed to look like a video game rather than a real life representation, the demo found us in a futuristic office cubicle left to our own devices. The demo really highlights how you’ll be able to, using the controllers, pick up objects in the game world by moving your hands in the real world. The demo lets you pick up everything from coffee cups to telephones – yes we clunked our head lifting the controller to our noggin – to pressing buttons to turn on computers or scan something on the printer.

It’s pointless, has little entertainment value and if you get a chance to play it will tire of it quickly, however it shows what huge potential VR experiences have beyond a “games controller” and one that the Vive will enjoy over non dedicated controller supporting devices.

Valve

HTC Vive: Dota 2

The Secret Shop is one of the Vive experiences we’ve tried so far that really shows the gaming potential of the headset. It is based on Valve’s hugely popular multiplayer game, Dota 2, and the experience is set in a magical wonderland that features spell locations that once found and enabled shrunk us down and placed us in different, often scary situations – including being faced by one of our major fears in the shape of a giant spider.

Where the demo was a magical as its theme was in its interactive denizens. A small, friendly dragon, for example, followed you around the room as you explored – recoiling when you approached directly. It made the whole room feel tangible and real, even with a heavily cartoon aesthetic. This is VR gaming at its best, placing the wearer into a detailed environment and giving them multiple options.

HTC Vive: Current challenges

HTC Vive currently has some real challenges before it will work in a typical home environment. As you’ve probably gathered, content is going to be everything and content is where VR currently struggles. We’ve seen demos or showpieces from Cardboard to Gear VR, through to bigger systems like Oculus Rift, and this needs to be more than being able to look around the inside of a car, or falling out of a plane.

Yes, we have played Elite: Dangerous and Alien: Isolation on Oculus, but even they felt like test demos at the time (mainly because they were). The real key is finding ways to make VR work in new ways.

How do we use Vive’s freedom of movement and what sort of play space will you need? Is this going to lead to people converting their garages into VR playrooms? Can we build a Holodeck in the garden?

But on the creative side, it’s not going to be about isolated demos. Virtual reality will need worlds that can use the movement. Many VR experiences are confined to a seat, so how do you make movement work in games? Head movements make perfect sense, but what about running and sidestepping? How does this become a first person shooter experience for the mass market?

Then we have the price – £689 is a lot to risk on a new technology. With such bold ambitions, we have the feeling that the first experience you’ll have of VR via HTC Vive won’t be in your living room, but more likely in a car showroom or another commercial setting.

First Impressions

We’ve been wowed by HTC Vive, that much is obvious. The demos we’ve played since our first experience in early 2015 show that it’s a very exciting space, and goes well beyond experiences of VR in the past. That serves as a great showcase for what can be done, but to make this into the home there needs to be a rich variety of engaging content. It’s going to be creative genius that makes a convincing argument for virtual reality at home, rather than the hardware itself.

Whether that is helping you see an underwater shipwreck or the view from the highest peak, the chances are you’ll be able to experience places you’ve never been before or will never be able to go to, all from the relative comfort of your own home.

But then there’s the other side of Vive, and whether that’s picking a kitchen or seeing what your new car will look like in hot pink, we suspect you’ll start to see VR pop-up in lots of places, many of which you hadn’t initially thought of before.

HTC Vive is hugely impressive and for any technology fan, something that needs to be experienced. It delivers an experience that offers the potential to go beyond its VR rivals, but that doesn’t come without challenges. Being able to take advantage of Vive’s technology in a practical way, with mind-blowing content, will determine Vive’s eventual success.