If the point of virtual reality headsets is to transport their wearer into another world, then HTC's Vive VR is already a success. I strapped myself in for one of HTC's demos at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, and I did indeed feel like I had stepped into the 3D worlds rendered around me. But that standard has already been met by the excellent Oculus Rift, the headset that got the world excited about VR all over again. Where the Vive VR looks to set itself apart is by expanding the scope and scale of motions that I can perform while inside its simulated realms.

Oh, and it has some pretty outrageous controllers, too.

Co-developed by HTC and feted game developer / distributor Valve, the Vive VR is designed to deliver a "full room-scale" experience. It's comprised of a big headset that plugs into a PC — a powerful graphics card seems like it'll be a must here — and two wireless, wand-like controllers. The controllers have clickable touchpads that rest under the thumb, trigger buttons for the forefingers, and a third input that's activated by squeezing the grip. It's certainly an odd and unfamiliar system, but I found myself growing accustomed to it after just a few minutes — it will be up to software designers to make good use of the technology and the unconventional inputs. One of the early demos, Tilt Brush by Skillman & Hackett, does a beautiful job of this and has me thoroughly excited for the Vive VR's potential.

The wireless controllers are accurate and full of potential

Before diving into the fun stuff, though, I have to note a couple of significant limitations to the present Vive VR experience. Firstly, whether you're getting a demo at MWC in Europe or at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, everything will be wired rather than wireless. The controllers are light, and the headset is more comfortable than its large size would suggest, but I could never truly feel immersed in the experience with all the wires and cabling I had to avoid while exploring the Vive. I even had to wear a harness around my waist to make sure I didn't walk too far off in any given direction.

Without motion tracking, VR headsets have a natural ceiling to what they can do. The Vive VR lifts that by using a laser-based motion tracking system — all the weird little glass plates scattered across the front of the headset are laser receptors — to know the exact position and orientation of my head at all times. Valve's Steam VR software platform makes sense of that data, in combination with information about what I'm doing with the controllers, to generate a highly precise picture of what I'm doing and where I'm doing it in three-dimensional space. The next step is to simply (simply!) generate a 3D environment that reacts appropriately to my gestures and movements. This is where the second downside I spotted comes in: the displays inside the Vive headset didn't impress me at all. Though they have a very reasonable 1200 x 1080 resolution each, I could detect the red, green, and blue subpixels when looking at a supposedly gray screen, which takes away from the immersion.

As with any developer edition, the hardware is not yet fully refined

Still, this is supposed to be a developer edition and not the final commercial product that will be coming by the end of the year. I'm confident that both HTC and Valve will do much to improve the user experience between now and the eventual release.

Once I got into the series of demos, the imperfect image quality wasn't much of a distraction. First up was TheBlu from Wemo Lab. A version of this already exists for Samsung's Gear VR, but I hadn't previously experienced it, and the Vive recreation was really quite impressive. I stood on the deck of a sunken ship, observing fish swimming around me. I could interact with the tiny ones nearby by waving my controller at them, though thankfully the gigantic whale's arrival was a non-interactive affair. There's a subtlety to the Vive's appeal here that's hard to spot because it's so natural. I could squat down for a lower view, pivot and "look" behind me, and even walk around for a few steps in any direction. A wireframe cube border shows up if I go more than three steps from center, highlighting the boundaries of my real-world environment.

In a later demo, where toy soldiers were sieging a fortress with guns and cannons and tanks and, yes, even a dirigible, I was able to kneel down and actually see below the simulated game table they were fighting on. It was like peeking behind the curtain of 3D games.

Valve has also put together what I'd describe as a mildly interactive Portal short movie. It's called Aperture. I was tasked with repairing a malfunctioning drone, and my inevitable failure drew the always-sarcastic disapproval of GLaDOS. As much as I love Portal, I found that to be the weakest part of the Vive VR demo; I was just following highly specific orders and wasn't given any freedom to experiment and interact with things that weren't designed to be manipulated by my virtual hands.

I started painting in 2D, then I turned my square into a cube and the whole world changed

The Job Simulator by Owlchemy is the converse of Valve's Aperture: its graphics are much more crude and basic, but it allowed me to interact with everything inside a 3D kitchen. I microwaved a tomato, served up a beef steak, and cracked many eggs. This was actually the perfect demo for VR: the rudimentary and clumsy actions I was performing reminded me of those of a young child that's first getting to know the world around it. That's the stage at which virtual reality experiences are today. Their makers and their users are still figuring out what works, what doesn't, and how all the pieces fit together.

My killer app for any VR headset with 3D motion tracking is the aforementioned Tilt Brush. It's basically like living in my very own music video. Everything gets darkened around me, I'm handed a color palette in my left hand and a paintbrush in my right, and then I can go crazy doing vibrant, beautiful light drawings in the space around me. Everyone apparently starts off by painting in 2D, and so did I, but I quickly realized that the square I'd made could be turned into a cube. It quite literally added an extra dimension of fun and exploration and is exactly the sort of unique experience that only virtual (or perhaps augmented) reality gear can deliver.

As early as this first try with the Vive VR may be, I'm excited by it. Hand and head tracking is done without any noticeable inaccuracies or latency, and if developers continue creating rich VR experiences like the ones I made my way through this week, there'll be plenty of reason to want one for your home.