A couple of months ago, a small team from Carl Zeiss visited our office to show us a prototype of the VR One, a smartphone-enabled mobile headset they'd cooked up. They wanted to make it available in December, but what they showed us what little more than a proof of concept—a molded-plastic viewfinder that relied on hard finger-taps in order to back out of the few apps they'd cooked up. It was externally attractive, but it was internally clumsy, and Zeiss was hoping that developers would pick up the slack when the unit became available.

Thankfully, they've rethought things a bit.

After we received the first official production unit last week and spent time with it, we're happy to report that it's in a much better place than it was in October. The $99 VR One, which is available for purchase starting today, is still very much meant for developers, and isn't without bugs, but the Zeiss team has given enough thought to the user experience that it's not hard to imagine the One becoming a cheap mobile option for VR enthusiasts.

The form factor is largely the same, though the headstrap has been finalized; what's changed is the way a user navigates and selects VR experiences. An internally developed app, VR One Media, now functions as a home environment—a container from within which you can install and launch other VR apps. It's a bit like being suspended in space among a matrix of screenshots for various apps, each of which can be launched by directing a small reticle over it. The reticle-selection mechanic has already been used everywhere from the Microsfot Kinect's gesture control to the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR, and it's a smart if necessary addition on Zeiss' part. (The launcher is still being tweaked by the Zeiss team—right now, the app screenshots appear too closely in front of you, causing vision strain, among other small issues.)

VR One Media/Screenshot

There's also now VR One Cinema, which places you in a barebones movie theater environment and lets you watch 3D (and 2D) video content. It's Zeiss' spin on what might be Samsung Gear VR's killer app, and even lets you sideload your own videos to watch. Granted, even high-def content takes a hit from having your eyes so close to a smartphone screen—even the iPhone 6 and S5 (the two phones which can be used with the system's phone trays at launch time) display obvious screen-door effect—but I was able to download a 3D video of extras from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video from YouTube and load it in without a problem. If you look at one of the theater's side doors for a few seconds, an icon menu pops up, allowing you to select videos or photos, pause the video you're watching, or navigate back out to the home environment.

VR One Cinema/Screenshot

Beyond that, any other VR apps available through the iOS App Store or Google Play can be installed and used. Again, a caveat: you're relying on your phone's internal gyroscope and accelerometer here, so latency is markedly worse than what it is on a dedicated device like the Oculus Rift, and simulator sickness is a very real hazard. (You might enjoy a roller coaster simulator on your Rift developer kit, but the smartphone version I tried was only comfortable if I kept my head still and moved only my eyes.)

You can also use the VR One Cinema app to look at photos. Zeiss AG

All that being said, Zeiss is doing what they can to give the developer community the best tools possible. They've made their Unity-based SDK open source, and beginning December 8 they're hosting a contest for developers to suggest and build experiences for the VR One. Is the Samsung Gear VR a more polished experience? Of course: it was made in conjunction with Oculus, a company that knows more about what works than anyone in the VR space, it has an onboard motion sensor to overcome smartphones' substandard-for-VR accelerometers, and it has the advantage of being designed to work with a single product (the Galaxy Note 4). But if you're an early adopter or a developer—or maybe you just want to be able to watch movies in a virtual theater while you're on an airplane—then the idea of a moderately priced solution that works with your existing phone is an attractive one indeed.