The Vive Cosmos is HTC's latest VR headset, presenting a significant upgrade from both the original Vive and the pricier Vive Pro. It completely does away with any need for external sensors, and its redesigned motion controllers are a big step forward. However, its $699 price is hard to stomach when the Oculus Rift S can be had for $399. And, as a PC-powered, tethered headset, you still have to wrestle with a clunky cable while you play around in virtual reality, and after using the completely standalone Oculus Quest, it's hard to comfortably go back, no matter how much more powerful a tethered system can be.
The Headset
The Vive Cosmos looks a bit more colorful and playful than the Vive, with a dark blue outer body covered in a triangle pattern, and two forward-facing cameras reminiscent of eyes (joined by four more cameras mounted on the top and bottom edges of the front, and on the left and right sides of the visor). A pupillary distance knob sits below the right-facing camera, and a power LED and button sit below the left-facing camera.
The entire visor is mounted on a single hinge that connects to the large plastic arch on the front of the three-point headband. The headband extends around the back of your skull with a second plastic arch with a clicking wheel that loosens and tightens it. If plastic sounds cold and hard to you, don't worry; both arches are padded with foam and covered in faux leather. An elastic strap loops from the back arch to the front, and connects to itself with hook and loop fasteners to ensure a secure fit.
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A set of on-ear headphones rest on short arms on the sides of the headband, and can flip up and down and slide vertically to adjust to your ears. Unfortunately, the arms are a bit too flexible, and the hinge a bit too loose, so you need to reach up to the hinge itself and press down firmly to get the headphones to click into place over your ears. If you try to just pull the headphones against your ears without manually clicking the hinge closed, they'll just pop off.
The Vive Cosmos displays a 1,700-by-1,440-pixel resolution picture to each eye, edging out the Oculus Quest and HTC Vive Pro's 1,600-by-1,440 resolutions. It isn't quite as sharp as the HP Reverb's 2,160 by 2,160 pixels per eye, but it's still very good. A 90Hz refresh rate matches these other headsets, and keeps movement smooth.
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New, Better Motion Controllers
HTC is finally catching up to Oculus' ergonomics for controls, with a completely new set of motion controllers. They are decidedly Oculus Touch-like, with rounded grips, curved triggers that conform to your index and middle fingers, and analog sticks instead of touchpads. They feel very comfortable in the hands, and less rigid and straight than the Vive's controllers.
A thick plastic ring extends upward around each controller's buttons and analog stick, also like the Oculus Touch. The rings feature translucent bands around the edges and geometric patterns along the middle, that light up when the controllers are turned on. They look striking and vaguely Mesoamerican, and help the headset's cameras track the controllers' positions.
Connections and Requirements
The Vive Cosmos connects to your PC through a Link Box identical to the one that comes with the HTC Vive Pro. It's a small, gray plastic box about the size of a cell phone. The back holds power, USB, and mini DisplayPort connections, and the front has a connector for the Vive Cosmos itself, which fits the plug on the end of the headset's 15-foot cable.
The Link Box needs to be connected to the computer with a USB 3.0 cable (included) and a mini-DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort cable (also included; the mini DisplayPort end connects into the Link Box), and plugged into a power outlet with the included adapter. A full-size DisplayPort connection appears to be required, which means you'll need a desktop PC with a dedicated graphics card; attempting to set up the Vive Cosmos on a gaming notebook that otherwise meets all the requirements of the headset, but only has a mini DisplayPort, resulted in errors.
Speaking of requirements, you need a fairly powerful PC to use the HTC Vive Cosmos. The headset requires at least an Intel Core i5-4590 or AMD FX 8350 CPU, 8MB of RAM, a DisplayPort 1.2 output, a USB 3.0 port, and an Nvidia GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 480 graphics card (though HTC recommends at least an Nvidia GTX 1070 or Radeon Vega 56).
Head Tracking Without Base Stations
The six cameras on the headset mark the biggest change the Vive Cosmos makes over the Vive and Vive Pro. These cameras track the headset's position by monitoring its surroundings, completely removing the need for any external base stations or sensors. This makes setup much easier, cutting out the tedious step of properly placing two base stations at prime corners of the room. It's new for Vive, but Oculus beat HTC to the punch by half a year; both the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S already use similar outward-facing camera systems, and neither need the external cameras the original Rift requires. This leaves the Valve Index and PlayStation VR as the only major VR headsets that still require external sensors to work.
The camera array is certainly functional from a hardware perspective, but it proved very finicky in testing. When setting up a test space, the headset kept giving an error saying the environment was too dark to track motion (despite seeming to track motion quite well). Only after we opened all of the shades and curtains to get light in from the outside did the Vive Cosmos start to work properly, and even then it gave occasional lighting errors. Our test studio has strong overhead lighting and white walls, and has been sufficient for every other VR headset we've tested, so this problem is new. Fortunately, HTC recently pushed a software update that lets you dismiss the lighting error messages and use the headset without the warnings.
Viveport and SteamVR
SteamVR drives most of the Vive Cosmos' connection with your PC, with HTC's Viveport software layered on top of it for content specific to the Vive. Viveport uses its own pop-up menu system, Vive Lens, to let you select what to do in VR with the press of the Vive menu button on the right controller (you can summon SteamVR's own interface as well with the menu button on the left controller). It's a fairly simple interface that displays a floating menu inside most virtual experiences, with tiles representing available software that can be scrolled through with the analog stick.
Viveport features its own VR software store separate from SteamVR, but the two platforms work in tandem with each other so you can easily use SteamVR games on the Vive Cosmos. It also enables the use of Viveport Infinity, HTC's VR subscription service. For $12.99 per month (or $7.99 per month if you buy a full year), you get unlimited access to a large swath of over 600 games available on Viveport, including Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs, Fruit Ninja VR, and I Expect You to Die. It doesn't include some of the better games available on Viveport like Accounting+ and Superhot VR, though; you need to buy those à la carte (and in the case of Beat Saber, get it through SteamVR because it isn't available on Viveport).
The Cosmos Experience
I tested the Vive Cosmos with a handful of VR games, and it worked fairly well despite some frustrating quirks. The aforementioned light error is one of the biggest; when I turned away from a window, a message that the environment wasn't bright enough kept popping up. It disrupted gameplay flow, though it didn't seem to hurt head tracking. The new controllers also seem oddly limited in certain games. The Menu buttons brought up the Vive Lens and SteamVR menus, but I couldn't bring up the in-game menus of several titles I tested with those same buttons.
Superhot VR, one of my favorite VR experiences and one of the few I consider to be a must-try experience, plays well on the Vive Cosmos. Head tracking is accurate enough that you can easily dodge bullets, and the motion controllers feel natural enough that you can throw ninja stars and bottles at attackers with ease.
Beat Saber, played through SteamVR, functions decently at lower difficulty settings, but the controller tracking has problems keeping up with the harder settings. When the controllers move above or below the range of the headset's cameras very quickly, they disappear from the game for a moment and must be reacquired by the cameras to work properly again. While the headset uses the same kind of technology for motion tracking as the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S, it apparently can't keep up with frantic flailing nearly as well.
Accounting+ worked without any real issue on the Vive Cosmos. The comedy adventure/puzzle game keeps up with very accurate tracking of both the headset and controllers, and the fairly simple environmental interactions are consistent and natural.
Cursed by the Cable
All of these experiences suffer from the same problem faced by the Vive, Vive Pro, and Rift S: the cable. As a physically tethered headset, you need to be aware of the cable's position between you and your computer, and be careful not to tug on it or trip over it. The cable's quite long, and it's also a bit stiff, so it can easily get caught on itself.
After using the Oculus Quest, dealing with a cable in any way feels like a huge step back, even if the tether enables a more powerful graphical experience thanks to the power of the connected computer. HTC offers a wireless adapter for $299.99, but that's a steep expense that requires a free PCIe slot on your computer to work.
Pricey and Powerful, but With Compromises
The HTC Vive Cosmos is a technically impressive VR headset, but it doesn't go far enough to justify its $700 price. It has a fairly high resolution, improved motion controllers, and it doesn't require any external sensors. However, the Oculus Rift S offers a very similar experience for $400, and the HP Reverb boasts a much higher resolution (though frustrating Windows Mixed Reality issues) for $600.
Then there's the cable. It's the same kind of cable used by the HTC Vive, the Rift S, and the HP Reverb, and it doesn't get any easier to deal with over time. After using the Oculus Quest and enjoying completely untethered virtual reality, going back to tripping over a thick wire while playing games feels like a big step backward. Combined with the high price, it makes it hard to recommend the Cosmos over the Rift S, and I'd still choose the wire-free convenience of the Oculus Quest over both.
The HTC Vive Cosmos VR headset is a technically impressive improvement on the original Vive, but it's very expensive and you still have to deal with a cable.
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