1) Hardware:

-Resolution, refresh rate: identical.

-Field of View (how much you can see): 10 percent more on Vive.

-Head Tracking: Hands down the Vive. While it is true that on the software side Oculus MIGHT be a bit better at launch, the Vive's choice to use its lighthouse system where you get multiple angles of sensory input, AND more sensors on the physical unit makes it far better. I've used both and its VERY noticeable.

-Futureproofness(?): The Oculus is made for sitting down. The developers have made this very clear. You CAN have standing experiences but don't expect to walk around. Right out of the box, the Vive has enough kit for you to make a 15x15 foot area for you to have as a Holodeck. But if you want to buy more lighthouse units you could turn an entire paintball field into a FPS if you so wished. I don't think you will be getting the ability to do 5,000 sq feet at launch without some hacking, but the devs have said they will be allowing this kind of madness as soon as possible. Oculus is completely closed, Vive is completely open. I mean cmon, its Valve. You paid for the hardware, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want with it. VR headsets are not consoles. They are televisions. Televisions that go on your face. How stupid would it be if XBOX only let its games work on one tv? It would be really stupid. The Vive is just the launch headset for SteamVR. Any company that wants to make one can.

-controllers:

I can't answer this one very well, as I haven't used the Oculus touch controllers.

The Steam controllers, even though they look ugly, are goddamned perfect in-game. Those touchpads that are a complete and utter gimmick in trying to replicate a mouse and WASD on the steam controller, are INCREDIBLE in vr experiences. They have amazing feedback, you can do things like cock the hammer of the gun back and you get feedback, etc.

-looks:

if the Vive we've seen is the one they go with, hands down this goes to Oculus. Both the headset and the controllers look sexier. This is not surprising actually if you consider that Facebook began as a hot or not site (Facemash), and when you remove its message system it still IS a hot or not site.

But I feel like the overlap between people with $2000 gaming rigs and people who care about looking cool while gaming is remarkably small.

2) Software:

I really really REALLY don't understand Facebook's choice in trying to play the exclusive game against Valve.

Ok, so on Oculus your exclusive is Eve. And even then the Eve devs are trying as hard as they can to let people know they are "open to other systems". Translation: "If we make more money from Marky Mark's exclusivity $$$ than we would by selling to steam, then we will be exclusive to Oculus"

So with Oculus you [might] get EVE as an exclusive.

.... with the Vive you get the Valve titles.

The founder of Oculus said (at SteamVR even funnily enough) that what it would take for VR to take off is its "killer app". He said that noone really knows what that will be.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that Portal is going to be that killer app. The ability to play a DOTA game with the field out in front of you will be amazing, Team Fortress VR and Left4Dead VR and (hopefully) HalfLife VR will be amazing also. But Portal in VR is going to be goddamned spectacular.

Plus with the Valve ecosystem you get the omniscient modding community whose ability to find some unthought-of experience and whip it up out of thin air will only become more interesting in VR. More on this later.

Also I know Facebook went on a pretty exorbitant shopping spree as far as hiring talent, (even poaching VR talent from Valve) but the Valve team have always been the cream of the crop, and unless they all can be bought, my money is on the Steam Team. Yeah, steam boxes and the steam controller haven't been that popular, but when has there ever been a Valve game that didn't blow people away?

This won't matter to most people, but to those interested in using non-gaming applications (job simulation, psychological testing and treatment applications, virtual presence etc), the aforementioned nature of the scalability of the lighthouse system and the higher level of control and feedback offered by the steam controller will be far better in this respect.

3) Other:

In case it wasn't completely obvious by now I am not the biggest fan of Facebook as a company nor of Mark Zuckerberg as a person.

He has built a company based on a stolen idea whose hook is to encourage competitive narcissism and whose monetization strategy is this: Letting the second best Artificial Intelligence system on the planet crawl through every message you have ever sent, every post you have ever made, count every nanosecond that you stop scrolling to read something; track and analyze your daily movements, speech patterns, the kinds of sites you visit, the music you like, the things that offend you, the geometries of the faces that you find attractive, precisely what does it take in a conversation between you and a member of the opposite sex for you to start a relationship, what you do when you're sad, what you do when you're happy or horny, check every emoticon or reaction gif you have ever sent against their database of precisely what emotion it represents (you think they added gifs to messenger so you could have fun?), and keep all of this in a little file with your name on it. They then sell the contents of this file to the highest bidder for such an exorbitant price that each Facebook user is worth 300 bucks cold hard cash to the Zuckerbeast.

Once on post by Stephen Hawking, he made this comment immediately after expressing his interest in making [billionaires] live forever:

"...I’m also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about. I bet there is."

They bought WhatsApp simply because it had more minds using it, and more information to be farmed from them. They bought Oculus for the same reason. They launched a free "internet" to developing countries so that they could farm those people as well, it was nothing more than a walled in facebook garden, and Oculus will be the same walled garden.

You might wonder why I am getting my panties in a twist over some stupid VR headset.

It isn't just about the headset, it’s about the future of VR.

Some people think that all we need for a global Utopia is for there to be an end of Warfare, murder, theft, rape, lying, and cheating. For noone to starve to death, for everyone to have access to food, water, shelter, and good healthcare, if you're transhumanist you would add immortality to that list.

To this I say BULLSHIT. How many millions of people have all those things (minus immortality) and are completely miserable. In order for us to ever have true global equality, we can't just think of equality as the bottom two layers of the Hierarchy of Needs, we need to consider all layers.

These days happiness is, whether we like it or not, almost exclusively synonymous with money. Not because the number in your bank account is higher, but because that number directly relates to experiences you can have. The more money you have relative to others, the more experiences you can have that they can't. And it is this feeling of exclusive experience that we have been conditioned into thinking is what should make us happy. The feeling of owning a Ferrari wouldn't be amazing if everyone else on planet earth owned a Bugatti. The feeling of owning a penthouse apartment wouldn't be amazing if everyone else owned a Taj Mahal. The feeling of having Selena Gomez as your girlfriend wouldn't be amazing if everyone else had Angelina Jolie (or insert your sexiest woman here). There's an old fable about the Rich Man who was cursed by having a genie in a lamp that granted him every conceivable wish...but gave twice as better and twice as much to every other person on earth...the Rich man killed himself.

My point is that both happiness and sadness in today's culture is entirely relative to how many people there are sadder than you and how many people are happier than you. (thanks again for encouraging that trend Facebook <3).

And it isn't equality of health, or education, or respect that will allow planet earth to be full of happy people, it is equality of EXPERIENCE.

What VR has the potential to do is provide experiential equality. It may not be in 5 years, or in 10 year, maybe it won't be until we figure out Brain-Computer interfaces. But sooner or later, the makers of digital worlds will be able to make experiences that make the most decadent pleasures of the Rothschilds seem dull and boring.

And if those experiences are free for everyone, and unrestricted, THEN we will finally have global equality.

If the future of VR is controlled by a single group of already extraordinarily wealthy people, then there will never be this experiential equality simply because those individual's happiness will be directly threatened by feeling as if they suddenly aren't so special anymore.

And the designers of the virtual worlds will make virtual objects that only the Rich can buy, virtual palaces only the Rich may inhabit, Virtual experiences only the Rich will ever know.

The exclusivity-obsession and Darwinistic success-battling that is responsible for all the unhappiness and, forgive me, "evil" in the world will not only still be prevalent, it will be able to be manipulated by those in power to heights inconceivable to us now. And it will be "locked in" to our human history in such a way that there will never again be a hope of us reversing it.

The future of VR MUST come about in very much the way that Valve is trying to push itself into operating: where the community, and the individual is the creator AND the consumer. Valve has been putting more and more money into making easier and easier to use tools for game creation, and becoming less and less of a development company and more and like a referee who keeps the thrashing, raving creativity of the steam community in some faint semblance of organization. Because they realized a long time ago that they "can't compete with their users". 90 percent of all content in Team Fortress 2 is made by the community, and these kinds of numbers are only going to get higher and higher all across the Valve way of doing things.

The future of VR MUST be a community-based creation system. Similar to what was (unsuccessfully) attempted by Project Spark, and what is being attempted again by Dreams (by the makers of littlebig planet).

VR MUST be free!

It is the single most important technology of the next generation, and it must be allowed to become yet another corporate tool for harvesting power from the common man.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire, yes, but only just. And what's more important, he doesn't consider the games Valve makes and sells to be bunches of code that magically makes people give him money. He actually enjoys and plays them! Can you imagine Jeff Bezos actually sitting down and watching a Twitch stream?? Of course not, he thinks everyone on Twitch is a pathetic loser who is good for nothing than being farmed of their money in exchange for feeling special enough for being briefly acknowledged by someone who plays video games for a living.

Gabe is right there watching with you. And yes he may take our money, he respects us.

Viva la Valve!