VIVE Wireless Adapter vs TPCAST Adapter. Say bye to the cables

Cables, that great impediment a lot of times make a Virtual Reality experience not as immersive as it could be without them. This is why companies looks for ways to not need the cables. Today we’re going to talk about the solution HTC offer us for HTC VIve headsets: Vive Wireless Adapter, and what other options we have.

Vive Wireless Adapter is not the first wireless device for HTC Vive. TPCast offers a wireless system for the headset with around 5 hours of continuous use. Although some reviews talk very about this adapter, but as it isn’t supported by HTC it doesn’t have yet a version for HTC Vive Pro and the one that already exists may have too many components such as an specific Wi-Fi router.

Vive Wireless Adapter looks like a great solution and they showed it some months ago during the German Gamescom.

But how is this better than the TPCast option?

First of all it has versions for both Vive and Vive Pro and cheaper 299.99$ and 359.99$ (depending on if it is regular or Pro device) against the 499$ of TPCast version.

On the other hand the battery life is lower, 2.5 hours for HTC’s adapter while TPCast has 5.

It is true that it isn’t that common to use a headset that long but since you can replace the batteries in the TPCast version is a point for them.

And what we think is the strong point for Vive Wireless Adapter is that up to three players can work at the same time with one computer, as long as it has all the PCI-e cards on it, but it is something TPCast doesn’t have. The only problem we can find for this case is the playset area, which can’t be bigger than 6m x 6m, but still, it should be enough and better than TPCast, 4.8m x 4.8m..

From VT-Lab we can’t really recommend one or the other, only in the case you have the Pro version of HTC Vive and because right now you have no more options, but if that’s not your case there are two things you have to look at, time and money and with that make your own choice.

If you want to know more about wireless devices here you have a post about them