The team over at ProTube made a massive improvement to the immersion in shooters with the release of their ProTubeVR peripheral. Now the team have released the ProTasVR to bring a more cost-effective Hotas system, with No Man’s Sky the main title in mind – with it’s lack of support for the Hotas. We have now put it through some testing, so what did we make of this new peripheral?
Please Note: For this review I tested it using both the Oculus Touch (Rift S) and the Valve Index Controllers.
Whats in the box?
Inside of the box you will receive the base for the ProTasVR, the cup for your controller of choice, some ProTube branded wrist straps and a couple of hex keys. This is all the product needs to give you the Hotas feeling.
Setting it up for you
The is two possible ways to use the product, on the bottom of the base there is a sticky pad – which by default is covered by a piece of plastic. This is how the team have made the two options available all depending on the user’s preference.
The way we used it and found it the most comfortable for our set-up is by leaving the plastic over the sticky pad and using the straps on the base to attach it the arm of my chair. This is where those Hex keys come into use, once you have it in the position you like or need it, you can loosen the joint on the arm of the base and angle it to your required needs and tighten it in place.
The other way to use is it, if you have a solid surface that you are more comfortable using you can take off the plastic and stick it to that surface. This sticky pad seems simple to remove – well it was the only time we stuck it down for testing. However, if you are going to use it this way, we would suggest sticking to something where you don’t need to remove it, as constant removal might make it lose that stick over time. Again you can then adjust the arm to make it comfortable for you.
Both of these way are really easy to get it ready for use, and you will using the product in no time.
Design
The design comes with multiple choices it’s all down to you which you prefer. You can choose if you are left or right-handed, which will decide what cup you are sent. Then you will get the choice of the colour of your base and the colour of your cup – these are available in grey, black, red, blue and white. For this review we were sent a black base with white cups.
The ProTasVR only comes with the magcups, which gives you two ways to use the product, outside of the Valve Index Controllers. With No Man’s Sky having sections where you need to explore on world, you can’t really use the controller in the cup on the base at these points – so you do need to remove the controller.
With the Oculus Touch cups, you can either remove the cup from the base by twisting the cup to remove it or remove the controller out of the cup fully and replace it when needed. The way it works with removing the cup is by the magnet connection being broken, which is a pretty strong magnet – this way will take some practice at first. Although I still find it more comfortable and easy just removing the controller personally.
When it comes the Index Controllers, the only way you can do this is by removing the cup from the base, as the cup will be physically attached to your controller with cable ties, given the design of the controller.
Quality
As with the ProTubeVR, over our time testing it I can say the quality of the products build is really high. The base is made of two layers of really solid plastic held together by screws, and as previously mentioned the bottom of the base consists of a sticky pad that will keep it solidly in place if you choose that method.
When we first unboxed to product we were concerned about arm of the ProTasVR. The reason for this was it is just plastic, and although this was thick, we were worried about the durability of this part of the product. However, after a number of hours of gameplay and also just general testing we are now confident this is nothing to worry about.
With the cups being made of the same solid plastic as the base, with the strong magnet makes sure they stay connected with no accidental removals and this completes this overall high build quality.
The immersion and benefit
With the ProTasVR being made with No Man’s Sky in mind, although it will work with other games with Hotas support, we completed our testing exclusively on No Man’s Sky.
Let’s start by looking at the benefit of the product. The main thing we found was the comfort gained when flying your ship. I personally found when flying in No Man’s Sky I constantly found myself pushing forward way to far and having my arm angled right down when in long travel sections. Now this keeps my arm in place as I can’t continue to push forward. Then with the extra comfort comes the added ease of flying, with all feeling a little more natural with the tension and pull on the arm of the ProTasVR.
These benefits bring with it that immersion we are all looking for in VR. With the aforementioned tension and pull provided by the ProTasVR bringing it the most. Just having that feeling when using the flight stick within your ship makes you fully immersed when controlling it, which brings another level to this already awesome VR control scheme within No Man’s Sky.
For the purposes of transparency, this review was created using a review sample of the product provided by the company or their respective PR company. The use of a review sample does not affect my judgement of the product.
