SEATTLE—The HTC Vive isn't like any computing device I've ever put in a home. This "room-scale" virtual-reality system is at the bleeding edge of what I'd call "home-appropriate"—meaning, it's pretty ornate and complicated, but not so much that you need to dedicate an entire lab or office space to it.

Though you might assume that. Many question marks currently hover over the burgeoning VR industry, thanks to issues like high costs, required computing power, nausea potential, and an unproven field of early software. The Vive goes one step further by also asking its buyers to clear out some serious space so that they can walk across a room and feel fully transported to a game or app's impressive virtual space. The demands that Microsoft asked of Kinect buyers a few years ago are tame compared to the cleared floors and mounted motion trackers of HTC's dream future.

Demand for space has been easy to shrug off at nearly a year of expo and convention demos, where game developers have done the setup legwork for us. We at Ars have spent less of our HTC Vive preview time sorting out logistics and more time letting our jaws drop to the floor. When it's hitting all cylinders, the SteamVR vision of room-scale VR is crazy-bonkers compelling. But what happens when VR dreams collide with the reality of installing and using one of these things in a home?

Thanks to early access to an HTC Vive Pre kit, ahead of the retail hardware's launch next month, I found out. I was surprised to learn that my assumptions about both the installation process and the resulting, shared experiences afforded by a full-room VR system didn't totally pan out.

Make room, kick your cat out

A reminder: The HTC Vive Pre is made up of "near-final" hardware. Every part of the system that showed up at a few Ars staffers' home offices last week could differ in tiny ways from the retail edition that will ship in April for a pre-order price of $800.

We don't expect many changes to the hardware half of the installation process, since the kit that arrived at my home very much resembles the hardware we've seen time and time again at press events. Our initial impressions report last week spelled out everything included in a Vive Pre shipment, but it failed to mention that the system shipped in a giant, 15-pound box, which itself contained four smaller, neatly positioned boxes. The whole thing was nicely padded and seemed designed to withstand the wear-and-tear of cross-country shipping.







Kyle Orland











As Kyle wrote, the box contains a head-mounted display (HMU), two motion-tracked controller wands, and two tracking stations with matching mounting hardware. Valve has confirmed that retail Vives will also come with little mounts that can either be drilled into a wall or ceiling or stuck in place using adhesive (and they should be superior to the ugly-but-functional mounts we got with the "near-final" set).

HTC and Valve didn't include an instruction booklet; instead, they direct new Vive Pre owners to this online manual, which spells out much of the physical process required. What it doesn't do is walk new users through what I would call the personal logistics of making space in your home for room-scale VR.

The manual suggests you use a room that's "at least 2m x 1.5m," "free of furniture and pets," and has "some free space." That only scratches the surface of the elements you need to consider in choosing and setting up your VR room. In my own case, I had two potential VR spots to choose from: the main living room (right inside the entrance to the house) and an out-of-the-way basement office.

At first, the basement office seemed ideal, since it already housed the powerful PC I needed to run the Vive and didn't have any bulky furniture. However, my office also has relatively low ceilings. That's not a big deal for storage or for sitting at a computer, but it can be a big deal for games like Selfie Tennis, which could have you banging your controllers against the ceiling for jumping smash shots.

So, before you choose your own VR room, make sure it has enough clearance to hop around and return a pretend, high-flying tennis ball without feeling cramped. Even if most HTC Vive games won't push these vertical limits, rest assured that at least one person you introduce to VR will lose their bearings and try to test its sensing boundaries within minutes.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech