Why HTC Vive’s camera gives you ‘Terminator’ vision

You want to play virtual reality games, but you don’t want to rack up a $10,000 veterinarian bill because you stepped on the dog. That’s reasonable, and one of the headsets has a solution to this.

HTC’s Vive, which it built in partnership with SteamVR creator Valve, has an outward-facing camera that can show you the world around you. The device launched today for $800, and it specializes in room-scale VR. This is a kind of simulated environment that tracks your movement as you walk around a space that’s at most 15-feet-by-15-feet. It’s difficult to walk around a room while you have a screen strapped to each one of your eyeballs. To solve this, Valve enables players to instantly call up the camera at any time by double-tapping the System button on either one of the Vive motion controllers. But this doesn’t work exactly like you would expect. Instead of filling your vision with a high-definition color image, you get something more along the lines of Terminator vision.