On a recent sunny afternoon, I steered my bike toward Harvard Square. Then, in the offices of a startup called VirZOOM, I strapped on a black headset that completely covered my eyes, hopped on a stationary exercise bicycle, and pedaled into a virtual realm.

Instead of dodging drivers impatient to exit Soldiers Field Road or navigating construction on the Larz Anderson Bridge, I was riding a horse on an unpaved mountain path. Turning the handlebars let me steer left and right to collect digital coins, and if I rode “through” a wings icon on the path, my steed would transform into a flying horse. It was a much-improved environment for cycling — and, the company says, a way to get exercise without noticing it.

VirZOOM is part of a small group of local companies that believe virtual reality is on the verge of going mainstream. Instead of clunky, expensive equipment with lots of cables and imagery that can induce nausea, we’re seeing some headsets costing $200 or less.

But the “big bang” moment that many entrepreneurs are awaiting happens next year, when Oculus, a unit of Facebook, begins selling its headset to consumers. In part, that’s because a large number of companies are developing content, software, and accessories for it.

The price hasn’t been announced, but Oculus has sold an early version of its headset to software developers for $350. Sony is also releasing a headset in 2016, called Morpheus, that will plug into its PlayStation video game console. Sony hasn’t set a price yet either.

You can trace the lineage of virtual reality to research done at Harvard University and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in the mid-1960s by Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull. But the headset and other equipment required then was so heavy that it hung from a giant mechanical arm above the user; the pioneering demonstration acquired the name “Sword of Damocles.”

Today, most of the companies developing low-cost virtual reality headsets for consumers are in places like Japan, Taiwan, Washington State, and California, where Oculus is headquartered. But that doesn’t mean Boston has missed the VR wave, says Jeff Bail, senior software engineer at VT MÄK, a simulation software company in Cambridge. Most of the Boston VR community is developing software as opposed to headsets or hardware, though one company, Genji Glove, is working on a glove that lets you use your hand to control what happens.

Bail is among the organizers of the Boston Virtual Reality Meetup, a monthly networking event that features demos of new hardware and software, and more than 100 attendees. (At next week’s meetup, participants will be able to try out the VirZOOM bike and also the not-yet-released FOVE headset, made by a San Francisco startup.)

“The primary goal of the meetup is to let people experience this technology, and to promote Boston as a hub for VR,” Bail says.

At the meetup, you get a sense of the technology’s potential for fun, learning, and getting work done in a new way. But you can also see how raw it is. The first thing I wrote down when I attended the meetup a few months ago was, “Lots of restarting.”

Jeffrey Jacobson of the consulting firm EnterpriseVR was showing a demo that lets you design a surgical operating room in the virtual world, moving objects around with two joysticks to get the optimal configuration. Sample dialogue during the demo: “Press that button … Why is it not pressing? … Oops, you just destroyed two walls.”

Not surprisingly, game companies are betting big on VR, since many of the forthcoming headsets can be connected to gaming consoles. Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems has been developing a “music visualizer” called Music VR for several different headsets, including Sony’s Morpheus. It lets you play songs from your computer, and creates fantastical virtual worlds for you to explore while doing so — like your own personal 3-D planetarium show.

Oculus also announced a partnership with Harmonix at a gaming industry trade show this week, “but we’re not talking about what the project is,” says Harmonix co-founder and chief creative officer Alex Rigopulos.

There are also startups like Cambridge-based Specterras that see virtual reality as a new way to document the natural world and enable people to experience it without travel — or danger. The company has captured photos, laser scans, and video in locations like New Hampshire’s Flume Gorge and Australia’s Claustral Canyon, and assembled them so you can don an Oculus headset and move around them, hearing rushing water or seeing a highly venomous tiger snake curled up on a log.

“That’s the one that almost bit me,” explains Mike Breer, Specterras’s co-founder.

Luke Farrer, the other co-founder, says eventually they’ll add educational content about the environments, which they see as perfect for museums and classrooms.

Still others see virtual reality as a new communication tool. Andy Tsen of Jamaica Plain is developing a project called Tribe, which lets people wearing headsets in different places inhabit the same virtual space, talk with each other’s avatars, and even watch Netflix shows or YouTube videos together. Tsen’s fiancée lives in San Francisco, and he explains that “the idea was to make it feel like we’re sitting on the same couch together.”

Tsen says it’s still early for virtual reality as a business, and he isn’t yet working on Tribe full-time. In mid-2015, he says, VR feels a bit like smartphones “right before the iPhone came out.” It’s hard to imagine what the software will be able to do, and how much time we’ll want to spend with it.

But, Tsen says, “I’d rather be early than late.”