Although the HTC Vive saw a significant delay, pushing its expected delivery date way back from Q4 2015 to April 2016, development of the headset has not stalled. The new Vive Pre, the second Vive development kit, makes improvements across the board. Some 10 months ago, the Vive came out of seemingly nowhere and totally changed the landscape of the virtual reality market. Before Oculus had even announced their Touch VR controllers, HTC and Valve showed a system complete with a headset, controllers, and a room-scale tracking system and it's easy to tell that we were impressed. The Vive Pre takes that impressive system and makes notable improvements across the board, bring some of the unit's weaknesses up to par, and pushing some of its strengths to new levels. Pass-through Camera Although we wouldn't call it a "very, very big technological breakthrough", as HTC teased, the Vive Pre's pass-through camera is an undeniably useful addition to the headset. User's can invoke the pass-through camera at any time by double-clicking a button on the Vive Pre controller. It will also pop up as users walk up to the boundary of the room-scale tracking space. I found this automatic pass-through function rather distracting as the view fades in as an overlay onto the virtual scene, very much breaking the presence of the virtual world. Hopefully there will be an option to disable this, allowing users to go back to simply having a subtle blue grid appear at the boundary edge instead of thrusting the real world inside of the headset. The pass-through view appears as a highly stylized blue-tinted representation of the outside world which almost fills the entire field of view, save for a slice across the very top of your view. Although things seen-through the passthrough are aligned fairly in your view compared to where you'd actually be viewing them from in the real-world, everything feels bigger than it actually is. Your hands in particular feel much larger, especially given that you can still see your appropriately sized Vive controllers overlaid on top of them in the virtual space. This disparity in size is likely due to the pass-through camera's field of view not having a matching field of view with actual human eyesight. The pass-through footage has some crazy effects applies to it; there's something akin to edge-finding, which causes the edges of objects to glow. There's also what appears to be faux-contour lines that appear within those glowing edges. The pass-through view doesn't appear to be 3D, and HTC says that there's no depth-mapping happening, though they will allow developers to access the camera feed to do what they can with the data. Display, Lenses, and 'Mura Correction' While the Vive Pre's display resolution remains the same 2160×1200 as the original Vive development kit, in my time with the virtual world inside looked noticeably better than through original Vive. It's hard to describe, but it feels like the 'virtual air' around you is clear and crisp. When we asked HTC what improvements they'd made to the display system, we were told that the Pre now uses something the company is calling 'Mura correction,' which appears to have greatly levelled out inconsistencies in brightness between pixels. [caption id="attachment_40420" align="aligncenter" width="680"] Click to enlarge. An exaggerated visual approximation of the Vive without Mura correction (left) and with it (right).[/caption] On the original Vive, pixels appeared to have subtle but inconsistent levels of brightness from one to the next. This led to a different sort of screen-door effect, which HTC described as a "linen-like quality." This was especially notable on darker scenes. In the Vive Pre, Mura correction significantly improves this issue and makes the virtual world look noticeably clearer than before. HTC wouldn't go into detail about if Mura correction was achieved in hardware or software. The lenses for the most part seem unchanged. They still have large Fresnel ridges which cast noticeable light ray artifacts during high contrast scenes (like white text on a dark background), though it isn't very noticeable during brighter scenes. In the end, the Vive Pre's visual system feels to match that of the Oculus Rift consumer model, save only for for slightly more obnoxious light rays in high contrast scenes due the more coarse fresnel ridges on the lenses. IPD The IPD adjuster is back on the Vive Pre and easier than ever to change on the fly. Not only is the nob more grabable and easy to spin, but now you'll see a pop-up inside the headset which specifies what the IPD distance is set to, down to a tenth of a millimeter. This makes it incredibly easy to adjust on the fly and doesn't leave user's guessing what the right setting actually is. Just spin the knob until the measurement matches your known IPD and you're good to go. Continue Reading on Page 2: Ergonomics Ergonomics This was one of the areas where the Vive was sorely lacking compared to the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR. While the Vive experience itself was great out of the gate, the headset was bulky and heavy. The Rift CV1 felt to beat it on weight while PlayStation VR had the upper hand on comfort. [caption id="attachment_40261" align="alignright" width="325"] See Also: HTC Vive Pre Side-by-side Shows Significant Size Reduction[/caption] This has been addressed in a major way. The Vive Pre not only looks sleeker, but it's also seen a huge reduction in size. We don't have hard numbers on weight (though we're heard reports that the Pre is actually heavier than the original Vive), but it is noticeably more comfortable thanks to the headset resting much closer to your face, and to an improved head-strap which has better weight distribution and a wider gripping area. The Vive Pre controllers see even a more significant visual change from the controllers of the older Vive dev kit, and feel much closer to consumer hardware, though a bit plasticky compared to Oculus' Touch. While still fairly large, the new design pulls the center of gravity in toward the user's hands a bit more. [gallery type="square" ids="40497,40495"] The 'grip' buttons on the sides of the controllers are now in a much better position, but still seem a bit tough to grab if being used in conjunction with the trackpad. The trigger is now two-stage, which gives it a normal pull as usual with a button-like click when you pull it all the way. Rechargeable batteries are now built directly into each controller, charging over MicroUSB, and HTC says they'll last for around 4 hours. The company also says the haptic engine in the Vive Pre has been improved, though I didn't have enough time with haptic experiences to get a sense for how much. HTC and Valve have committed to making 7,000 of the Vive Pre development kits available prior to launching the consumer Vive in April, though they aren't saying if these units will be distributed through a closed process or become openly available for developers to buy. While there's likely to still be improvements made between Pre and the consumer Vive, it's hard to gauge how significant they will be. All in all, the Vive may not have hit its ambitious Q4 2015 shipping date, but the latest improvements show that Valve and HTC are on the home-stretch to launch.