If you have the budget, the HTC Vive is the best virtual reality experience on the market, bar none.

Update: The HTC Vive family will continue to grow in 2019 and beyond, HTC announced at CES 2019. Soon we'll see the HTC Vive Pro Eye, a headset with eye-tracking capabilities that will be more enterprise and business-focused, as well as a new gaming headset called the HTC Vive Cosmos that will be powered by your PC and other devices.

Last year, we got the HTC Vive Pro – a welcome step up from the original Vive headset – and a global availability announcement for the HTC Vive Focus, HTC's standalone VR headset that's squared up against the Oculus Go.

So which one should you get? The Vive Pro headset is fully compatible with existing Vive sensors and controllers, and offers an improved fit for more comfortable gaming. It also features excellent built-in headphones, improved screen resolution, and a tidier design. It's not a Vive 2.0, but it offers an experience that's significantly better.

The Focus and Vive Pro Eye are both enterprise-focused, so unless you're a business owner looking to do some hands on training they're not applicable to you, and the Cosmos is... well, a bit nebulous at the moment. For now, you just have to decide between the HTC Vive Pro and the original HTC Vive, reviewed below.

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Despite being one of the earliest premium VR headsets to his the consumer market, the HTC Vive lost no time in showing off the potential of virtual reality technology. For a long time, it has been the king of consumer VR tech.

In fact, it's so far ahead of some of its competitors that it can be difficult describing the experience of using it to someone who hasn't yet tried VR themselves – it's akin to trying to describe moving footage to someone who's spent their whole life staring at pictures, or describing a game to someone who's only ever watched films.

Even for those who have already used cheaper mobile VR hardware like the Gear VR, Google Daydream View or Google Cardboard, the HTC Vive is a serious upgrade that's hard to put into words.

But the highest compliment we can give to the HTC Vive is just how right it felt as soon as we strapped it on, and how easily all your reservations about VR fall away as soon as you use it – even if you've previously been a VR naysayer.

Virtual reality is still growing as a medium and, to that end, has some of the problems all platforms face when they first start out. At least one of those problems – the lack of games – is slowly becoming less of an issue as time goes by, and more and more quality titles hit the shelves.

Others might say VR is currently too expensive, or the hardware just isn't that good yet, but while it's a somewhat pricey setup, the experience you'll get on the HTC Vive is unrivaled. It's light years ahead of Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR, miles ahead of PlayStation VR and, until very recently, the Oculus Rift, too.

And, as it turns out, we're not the only ones who think so – developers agree. A 2016 study on Gamasutra reported that 49% of the companies they surveyed were currently developing games for the Vive while only about 43% said they were working on a game for Oculus Rift.

When paired with the proper hardware – a PC with an Intel Core i5-4590K and either a Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD R9 390 GPU – the HTC Vive is an incredible gateway into a new medium, one that is currently dominated by short demos and a growing library of games, but should one day play host to full-length films, television shows and contemporary art as well.

The positives, in condensed form, include: one-to-one movement tracking; a perfectly natural 110-degree field of view; there's nary a screen tear or dropped frame when you're using the right equipment; movement feels natural; it has best-in-class controllers; and the experiences, the demos and the games available through SteamVR simply blow the competitors away.

But before we tackle games, let's address what had been up until very recently the elephant in the room: price.

The HTC Vive wasn't cheap at launch or for a long time after, but earlier this year it got just a shade less expensive. As of now, the system, which includes the headset, the controllers, earbuds and the base stations themselves, sells for $499 / £499 (about AU$615), and that's before you buy a computer with the recommended specs.

The Vive now costs just $100 / £100 more than Oculus Rift, putting it within striking distance as far as price. Ultimately the question now is whether you'll find that it's worth the extra cash for a better experience, even though it's not as much cash as it once was.

That's a fair discussion to have, albeit one that we can do almost nothing about right now. New hardware, especially at the cutting edge of a nascent industry, is going to be expensive.

But wait, why is it more expensive? What exactly does it do?

How does the HTC Vive work?

The first time we got our hands on the HTC Vive was all the way back at Mobile World Congress 2015, where HTC made the original announcement of its partnership with Valve – and it's worth noting that it's been retooled and vastly improved since that original showing.

The consumer version works wonderfully, is vastly easier to setup and feels ready to be shipped to the public which, considering that units are supposed to go out any day now, is a very good thing.

Like other virtual reality headsets, the Vive has the arduous task of completely immersing you in a video game by producing two images simultaneously. However, unlike PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift that use a single camera to track your head and extremities, HTC Vive has two base stations, which sit on the wall attached to the included wall mounts or a high shelf and help map track your movements as you walk around in the 3D world.

What the stations track are small divots on the top of the two controllers and on the headset itself. There are 72 of these dots speckling the controllers and helmet that help accurately track the Vive.

Inside every box is a Vive headset unit, two controllers, two base stations, earbuds, a cloth to wipe down the lenses, a small hub that sits between the headset and your PC, charging cords for the controllers and power cables for base stations. Also packaged with every unit are three games: Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption and The Lab. It's everything you're going to need for a great virtual reality experience minus the computer that powers the whole thing.

New to the consumer version is a spectacularly simple setup program that should, for the vast majority of tech enthusiasts, allow you to breeze through the setup process.

Once you're plugged in and the room has been mapped out, you're free to roam around every inch of the digital space. This means digital worlds can be more expansive and more immersive on the Vive than the other two systems and, thankfully, less nausea-inducing, too.

The only limitations you'll encounter once inside your digital world are faint blue walls made up of lines that keep you inside the playzone. These blue lines are superimposed into your game by SteamVR, the software put out by Valve that's running underneath every virtual experience.

It's called "chaperone mode," and its practical application is to prevent you from moving too far outside the area that you've set up for the Vive and potentially stumbling into furniture/plants/animals/etc around your home and hurting yourself.

As for the games themselves, what's there is simply amazing.

In the course of two weeks, I've played 20 or so titles, some of which are much, much better than others. I'll cover them in detail in a moment but, in short, they were mostly fantastic showcases for VR, full of personality and just as varied as you might expect. One minute I was on top of a castle fending off stickman invaders with a bow and arrow, the next I was inside of an arcade cabinet fighting spaceships in three dimensions. I played mini-golf on an impossibly constructed multi-level course and trained to become both a ninja and space pirate.

Some of what I just described is part of Valve's The Lab, a collection of games that the iconic developer put together to introduce players to virtual reality. These are all very good titles, but third-party developers have now caught up and are releasing some very decent VR games too.