My name is Lee and I’m a hardware-a-holic.

(Hi, Lee.)

In walking the long path to VR on the PC, I’ve built a new gaming computer from scratch, bought peripherals out the wazoo, and, of course, pre-ordered both an Oculus Rift and an HTC Vive so I wouldn't have to choose between the two. If we’re including things like the peripherals I use when playing some VR games—like my Warthog HOTAS and Slaw Device pedals—then my grand total is hovering at $4,000 or so in VR-related expenses.

That’s a hell of a lot of cheddar to drop in pursuit of gaming, but the results make me happy. There isn’t a PC VR-related thing I can’t have. If it exists for Oculus Rift or SteamVR, I can play it. And I’ve been casting that net wide, jumping from VR game to VR game, trying over the past six weeks to eat as much as I can from this new buffet of experiences.

I’ve flown spaceships. I’ve climbed mountains. I’ve crashed exotic cars. I’ve swum with whales. I’ve done surgery on robots and worked as a short-order cook and collected space-Pokemons with an annoying robot who wouldn’t shut the hell up about what a great job I was doing. I’ve fired virtual shotguns, shot virtual arrows, played virtual mini-golf, and punched the crap out of hours and hours of virtual music.

I’ve basically become this guy:

Some conclusions and some opinions

After more than a full month with both the Rift and Vive—and more than a year before with the Rift DK2 to get my toes wet—I've reached a conclusion. The Vive does VR better.

Not to sell the Rift short—it's a hell of a device and I use it regularly. It’s got a lot of advantages over the Vive, especially ergonomically. It’s just flat-out more comfy to start. Spending more than 10 minutes in the Vive leaves my face a sweaty mess; the facial foam turns into a wet sponge of gross awfulness. The Vive’s weight is biased more heavily toward the giant clunky front, which itself looks weirdly bulbous compared to the Rift’s sleek minimalism. And the Rift’s integrated headphones crush the Vive’s janky yet-another-cable-required audio situation. In fact, the Rift's whole single-cable situation is so, so much lighter and more flexible than the Vive's bundle of wires.

Looking through the lenses, the Rift is probably a better bag, too. Both of them have great displays, but the Vive still has some more of the "screen door effect" (so named because the pixel and subpixel grid show up as a faintly visible black pattern, like looking through a screen door). The Rift has a bit of screen-dooring as well, but to my eyes the Vive has more and it’s more noticeable.

On the other hand, I prefer the Vive’s round field of view to the Rift’s rectangular one. In some games (particularly Elite: Dangerous), playing with the Rift feels and looks sort of like you’ve got a cardboard box attached to your face that restricts your vision. The Vive’s FOV shows a bit more area than the Rift’s—if you want to go down the FOV rabbit hole, this is a good place to start—but more importantly what it does show is mapped into a round area rather than a rectangle. The edges don’t intrude on the experience as much, and in this way the Vive is more like looking through a cardboard tube than a box. (Obviously, neither device is anywhere close to matching the width your eyes can see.)

I like the Rift. I prefer its ergonomics. I mostly prefer its screen (but not its field of view), and I prefer its integrated headphones. So why do I prefer the Vive? It's a great reminder that you cannot tell the entire story of a device purely from its spec sheet—and anyone who says you can is both crazy and wrong.

Software: Oculus Home is terrible, SteamVR is Steam

I understand the idea of Oculus Home—it’s the combo hub/library/store where you buy and manage your Oculus games and applications. Props to Oculus for the pure slickness of the launch experience, too. All you have to do is slip the Rift onto your face and the Rift's software fires right up. It’s a neat idea done very well.

Unfortunately, that's the only part done well. Oculus Home is a facade—it’s a huge open space you can’t do anything with. You can’t move around the environment, and you can’t interact with any of the carefully rendered details. It’s like a dumber and less-functional VR remastering of Microsoft Bob—though at least in MS Bob, you could move from room to room and click on things. In Home, you just stand there on your dumb little wrinkled area rug. Oculus Home is all hat and no cattle.

Home’s core interactive components are a superficial store, a superficial library browser, and an essentially nonfunctional friends list. Out of the box, the Rift and its software are configured to keep your VR experience locked solidly into Home; unless you toggle on an option in Home’s configuration, you can only use the Rift with applications you buy through Home's store. This is fixable with a quick option toggle, but I’d reckon the majority of buyers will never know to look for it. As such, most buyers won’t be able to use the Rift with any third-party software not delivered to them by Oculus Home—and that means they won't get to use the Rift with any Steam games.

Then, Oculus made the decision at launch to only allow Home to install applications onto your C: drive. This made some amount of sense. It streamlines the game install process by removing an interactive step that most people just click straight through anyway. But, it's a stupid thing to do considering the likely demographics of the Rift's early adopters. It's common practice among a lot of high-end gaming PC builders to use a small, fast SSD for boot and OS and a much larger hard disk drive for program installation. Because of Oculus' forced C:Program Files install location, no small number of early adopters found themselves having to play application Tetris to keep enough space free to install more than one Home game at a time. After considerable customer complaint, Oculus eventually issued an update with the option to use other drives.

Most offensive of all is Oculus' short-sighted toddler tantrum about exclusivity. The company has stepped up its efforts to use DRM to keep Vive owners from playing Rift-exclusive games and demos even if the Vive owners pay for the content. The company should be doing everything it can to encourage adoption of not just its own VR headset, but the idea of VR as a platform in general—this could potentially pay great long-term dividends in cementing the idea that VR is a good thing and developers and customers alike should join the party. Although Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had previously expressed the opinion that he didn't mind folks playing Oculus-exclusive games on the Vive, he has either changed his mind or been overruled by Facebook. The company has recently doubled down on its customer-hostile approach toward attempting to keep Oculus-exclusive titles confined to the Rift and only the Rift.

I understand that business is business and everybody at Facebook has to do their part to hit the quarterly guidance, but Palmer, if you're reading: shame on you and shame on Oculus. You are doing a bad thing, and you should feel bad.

While Oculus jealously tries to keep your chocolate out of its peanut butter, Valve and HTC have made the wise decision to build their platform on a foundation that the majority of the potential early adopter crowd already uses: Steam. The Vive makes use of SteamVR, and SteamVR is exactly what it says on the tin (Steam, in VR). The setup process is less polished than the Oculus Home installation, and the difference in tracking technology means you need to hunt out some elevated spaces to hang the two Lighthouse tracking boxes. Once you’ve got everything working, though, the initial VR tutorials are far more comprehensive and interactive. This is because VR in the Vive, with its two 3D controllers, requires a bit more explanation than the Rift.

SteamVR trounces Oculus Home. Though it doesn’t automatically launch when you put on the headset, it also doesn’t plop you inside a misguided skeuomorphic fake "house." Instead, you stand in a blank space (which you can customize with different backgrounds), and you can bring up a Big Picture-style Steam menu at the touch of a button. The friends list is fully functional as is everything else. If you're reading this, you probably already know how the interface and everything in it works because it's Steam.

And then, there are those 3D controllers. Folks, we need to talk about those 3D controllers.