With two major, groundbreaking features that set it head and shoulders above its current competition, the HTC Vive is the most capable and versatile of the pair of near-magical virtual reality headsets you can buy today. Thanks to sensors that track your position as you physically move around a room and allow you to use your hands to interact with the imaginary as though it were real, the Vive is vastly more effective at making me feel present within a game or other virtual environment than anything else I’ve experienced. All of that comes with drawbacks, however, in the areas of ease of use, practicality for most homes, and most significantly, reliability.

The $800 price tag might come as a shock to people who don’t normally jump on new technologies in their first iterations, but relative to other transformative or high-end products (think the first iPhone, or a nice 27” G-sync gaming monitor) that’s not unreasonable for what you’re getting. In addition to the high-quality headset itself, the Vive’s large box contains two room sensors (called Lighthouse beacons) and two hand-held controllers that easily explain the $200 price difference between the Vive and its rival, the Oculus Rift. Those devices enable the Vive’s main competitive advantage: the spectacular “room-scale VR” capability. Above and beyond the already impressive concept of letting you look all around you as though you were in a virtual world, which is closely matched by the Rift, the Vive lets you explore and interact with those worlds without the abstraction of pushing buttons to represent your hands and feet moving. Instead, if you want to do something, you just do it.

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“ That totals five different power cables.

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“ This 1.2lb bug-eye-looking headset is somewhat front-heavy, but not uncomfortable.

“ The elephant in the room is the thick, three-cable bundle that tethers you to your PC.

Based on a quick description these motion-tracked controls could easily be compared to Nintendo’s Wii, Microsoft’s Kinect, or Sony’s Move, but that would be a misconception. The Vive’s astonishingly precise tracking and one-to-one movement is so far ahead of anything any of those systems achieved it makes them look like broken toys by comparison. Instead of clumsily translating three-dimensional movements onto a two-dimensional screen, the Vive makes your in-game representation move exactly the way you do. If you see something in front of you, you can reach out and touch it just the way you’d expect to, with almost enough accuracy to thread a needle. And if you put a controller down, its in-environment representation lets you see exactly where it is – you can reach and pick it up naturally. That’s a mind-blowing experience, and a truly revolutionary way to interact with games.Making it work is the tricky part. The ideal setup for a Vive is elaborate and demanding: you’ll need a PC with at least an Intel Core i5-4590 or AMD FX 8350 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 (nearly identical to the Rift’s PC specifications) in order to maintain a 90 frames-per-second refresh rate, and a large, open space of at least six feet by five feet (1.8m by 1.5m) – larger, if possible. That’s hard to come by in most homes without making big changes. I was able to create a space of six feet by 12 feet in my family room by shoving aside a coffee table, and that space was big enough for all but one of the games I’ve tried. However, it’s not a situation I’ll be able to maintain permanently.Note that even if you can’t accommodate room-scale VR’s demands for unobstructed floor space, the Vive will still offer you something the Rift currently can’t: those controllers can be used in many games while in a stationary seated or standing position. As long as you have room to move your arms, and you have a gamepad (not included) for games that don’t support them, the Vive can do everything the Rift can do and more.Like the Rift (because it’s the only comparable product we have to reference right now) the field of view on the Vive looks much like what you’d see while wearing ski goggles or scuba gear. Directly comparing the two the Vive’s field of view is slightly larger, but it’s not a significant enough difference I’d have noticed if I weren’t looking for it. And also like the Rift, the Vive’s screen is actually two OLED screens with a combined resolution of 2160x1200. That gives you vision that’s clear enough to read text and appreciate detail in environments and character models, but the pixel density is still low enough that you can make out individual pixels, especially in bright environments. But anytime I was moving, I lost sight of those pixels quickly and felt fully immersed.A significant difference is that while the Vive packs an integrated microphone, it lacks built-in headphones. That can be seen as a benefit if you’ve already invested in quality 3D-sound hardware and don’t want to pay for another version that might not be as good as what you own. However, after the convenience of using the Rift’s all-in-one setup, I found having to juggle a set of headphones – even wireless ones – with the Vive to be a hassle. You can’t remove the Vive without removing the headphones first, and you must put the Vive on before the headset, which always left me groping to find it with my hands full of controllers. This made slipping in and out of VR more difficult, which is a drag because when you’re cut off from the real world it’s important to be able to come up for air once in awhile.To address this at least partially, a passthrough camera on the front of the headset can be used to peek into reality by tapping the home button on either controller to bring up the menu, or double-tapping to enable a Predator-like color-tinged outline of your real environment overlaid on the virtual one. Note that this extremely handy feature (the sole purpose of the camera’s existence) is completely disabled by default, probably to avoid system conflicts that the software warns you about when you enable it in the preferences. I experienced no problems with it, though.The Vive’s other unique feature is the light and versatile controllers, which reproduce your hand movements in virtual space with such precision that it feels las though my hand is actually in that world – or whatever other virtual item a developer chooses to turn it into. A gun, a sword or shield, a spaceship, a paintbrush – you name it. With triggers on the bottom and buttons on top, the handle resembles a more ergonomic Wiimote or a pistol grip, and the thumb touchpads are responsive and versatile, serving as anything from a gesture surface to scroll wheel to being subdivided into multiple buttons. Two side buttons let you squeeze the grip as a form of intuitive input. That ring-shaped piece on the top is there for technical tracking reasons, and hasn’t (so far) been used for anything in a game. It should be noted that while many games use the controllers to represent human hands, they’re not especially well suited for that task - there’s no way to intuitively control articulated fingers, for instance.