HTC Vive review - VR finds its Wii Sports moment

Visiting new realities is pretty standard stuff for your average gamer, but until now we've had to make do with viewing them through the window of a TV or PC monitor. Actually being physically present in those worlds? Now that's something else entirely.

And yet, 2016 might finally be the year that virtual reality takes off. Ever since a fresh-faced Palmer Luckey broke Kickstarter history with his Oculus Rift prototype in 2012, the hype and anticipation around VR has only grown more intense – so much so that every tech company on the planet now seems to be releasing its own headset, from big players like Sony and the now Facebook-owned Oculus right down to LG, Huawei and optics-manufacturer Zeiss.

Not all VR is created equal, though. Most headsets to date have utilised your smartphone in some way, most notably Google's Cardboard initiative and Samsung's Gear VR headset. However, your phone's mobile graphics hardware simply isn't up to providing a truly convincing VR experience. If you really want to trick your brain into believing you're somewhere else you need a lot more graphical horsepower.

That's why the HTC Vive (and Oculus Rift) must both be powered by hulking, great gaming PCs, putting these headsets a long way from the slot-in-and-play fun of Cardboard and Gear VR. In addition to that big desktop PC, the Vive has further requirements that make it even more of an 'enthusiast' product.

For starters, it costs a whopping £689, but more importantly its unique feature – full, room-scale VR that lets you move around freely in 360 degrees – requires a sizeable playing space to use properly. While many of us could make that space by chucking the coffee table on top a sofa, for example, it's unlikely that you also keep your gaming PC in that room, too. As well as finding that space, there's extra hardware (and cabling) that needs to be setup to track your movements.

What can you play on Vive? Here are our top VR gaming picks

Then there are all the problems it shares with the Rift; you might need to update your graphics card (HTC recommends you have an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon R9 290 for the best experience), or graphics drivers to ensure your PC is running smoothly. For some this is just day-to-day stuff, but this really isn't a device for casual consumers.

Admittedly, the world's most advanced virtual reality headset was probably never designed for them anyway; instead, the HTC Vive is what VR enthusiasts have been waiting for, because by golly does it deliver.

While I haven't tested the final consumer version of the Oculus Rift yet (although I do own a DK2), the ability to move and wave the Vive's two controllers around like proper, physical hands is really quite extraordinary. It's one thing being able to look around a virtual space sitting down and operating your virtual avatar with a gamepad, but being able to walk through it, lean over its precipices and throw your limbs every which way to evade its dangers? That's really quite magical.

In fact, I'm already pretty convinced that the Vive is more than worth the extra £189 it costs over the Oculus Rift. That may well change once Oculus finally releases its motion-tracking Touch controllers later this year, but when we don't currently know how much those extra controllers are going to cost – I'm estimating at least £100, if not more, on top of its £500 headset – the Vive probably isn't going to be as expensive overall as it might first appear.

Setting up Vive's Base Stations

The secret behind the Vive's room-scale VR is its two base stations. These small, glossy, black boxes can track your movements up to 60 times a second by bouncing lasers off the surface of the headset and controllers, all of which are studded with a dozens of tiny sensors to provide sub-millimetre tracking precision. The lasers also help keep latency levels to an absolute minimum, making sure that any feelings of nausea or motion sickness are kept well at bay.

You only need to be tracked by one base station at a time, but this isn't much good when you turn round or go out of range. Therefore, the second one comes into play to pick up the slack, allowing you to carry on playing without your world being disrupted.

Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR also use cameras to track your movements, but these only come with one device that sits directly in front of you, preventing them from doing proper room-scale VR. Both can (or will be able to) track the position of your hands as well provided you buy additional controllers – Oculus' Touch Controllers for the Rift and Sony's PlayStation Move controllers for PlayStation VR – but you still won't be able to move around the room, giving Vive a unique advantage when it comes to fully immersing yourself in your new virtual worlds.

However, for all their technical wizardry, the base stations are arguably the Vive's least practical component, as they require a fair bit of rigmarole to set up correctly. For starters, each one needs to be at least two metres off the ground, so you'll need to place them on something tall like a bookshelf or tripod, or more likely use the bundled wall mounts to get them to the right height.

They also need to be plugged into mains power and positioned in opposite corners of your play area to provide the best coverage, so unless you happen to have perfectly placed plug sockets, you'll either need to break out the extension leads and be prepared to have wires trailing round the edges of your room. The only thing you don't need to do is sync them with the headset and controllers, as this all happens automatically.

The whole thing is reminiscent of setting up home cinema surround speakers. Unless you're willing to do some serious DIY chasing in cables then you're going to have messy cabling, and it makes moving the whole setup, especially once your factor in the PC itself, a huge chore.

For room-scale setup, you'll need a minimum play area of 2m x 1.5m as well, but it doesn't matter whether you have a square setup or a rectangular one. These space requirements don't apply if you're playing seated or standing, but you'll still need to be positioned within the scope of the base stations for it to work.

Connecting Vive to your PC

Once the base stations are set up, though, the rest is fairly simple. The controllers charge via micro USB and come with chargers in the box, and the headset's 5m tether cable (which is already attached and connected to the headset) plugs into a small link box that then feeds into your PC.

This connects using USB and either HDMI or mini DisplayPort connections, but you'll also need to connect the box to mains power in order for it to function. All the necessary drivers are installed on your PC as soon as the Vive's connected, and then it's simply a matter of booting up SteamVR through Steam (a small VR button appears next to your account profile and Big Picture Mode icons) and going through the initial room setup tutorial.

This lets you map out your intended play space and calibrate the floor level so Vive can let you know when you're about to hit a wall. With these chaperone boundaries in place, you'll see a kind of virtual wire cage appear whenever you stray too close to the edge of your play space. This will fade away again once you step back, but you can also opt use Vive's Room View instead if you find this too off-putting.

This uses the Vive's front-facing camera to give you a glimpse of the real world in front of you, allowing you to see everything in a kind of neon-blue heat signature. It's not exactly life-like, but it might be more useful than the chaperone lines if you're playing in the middle of a room with furniture pushed to the side, as you'll be able to see it there in front of you instead of accidentally whacking it by accident.

With your play area mapped and your headset connected, the only thing left to do is to put on a pair of headphones. The Vive doesn't have any in the box – HTC thinks most gamers will already have their own preferred headsets – but it does have a small 3.5mm audio jack trailing out of its tether cable, making it easy to plug in your favourite cans. 

^ During the room setup tutorial, you can use the controllers to mark the outer limits of your play area

Headset hardware specs

In terms of the headset's technical specifications, the Vive isn't actually that much more advanced than its rivals. Inside, it has two 1,080x1,200 OLED displays – one for each eye – and they refresh up to 90 times a second, providing very smooth feedback for your head and hands.

It also has a 110 degree field of view, so it can still look like you're peering through a black-rimmed porthole at times, but you soon forget about it when you're shooting robot drones in space or gazing at enormous blue whales from atop the ruins of an underwater shipwreck.

The lenses are made from what HTC's calling 'Mura-Glass', which is meant to provide a clearer, sharper picture than standard glass. You can still see individual pixels if you really look for them, but I barely noticed them at all during my testing. It's certainly much clearer than the lenses used on Samsung's Gear VR, which just use regular glass, and they didn't smudge very easily either, so our virtual worlds always look razor sharp.

It's easy to adjust the Vive's focus, too, as it not only has a small knob on the front corner of the headset to change the distance between the lenses. They don't need any further focusing or fiddling to clean a clean, sharp image, unlike cheaper, smartphone-based headsets we've used.

For an even higher level of comfort, the Vive comes with two different face cushions – one for wide faces and one for narrow faces - and you can change them simply by peeling away the velcro. Both have grooves along the side for glasses, too, so you won't need to take them off when sliding the headset over your face.

The only snag, quite literally, is the five metre tether cable protruding from the back of the headset, as it was both a constant presence and mild concern while I was gaming. You're never moving about so much that you need to worry about tripping over it and doing serious harm to yourself, but you do need to be a bit careful when turning or twisting around, as it's easy for the cable to become tangled round your feet and legs.

Fortunately, the Vive lends itself well to the communal experience, as the Vive's HDMI output allows friends and family to see directly what you're seeing on your PC screen, giving you a crucial second pair of eyes to keep watch while you're playing. They can't hear anything, sadly, but at least they'll be on hand to detangle you if you get caught up.  

^ VR needn't be a solitary experience, as onlookers can watch what's happening on your PC monitor

Vive controllers

The headset's just one piece of the puzzle, though, as it's only when you get its wand-like controllers in your hand that the whole experience really hits home. They might look a bit odd with their round, doughnut-shaped hole at the top, but this circular void allows HTC to pack in even more sensors to help make them as accurate as possible.

It works a treat, too, as right from the off it felt like they were, to all intents and purposes, my actual, physical hands. They're super light, too, so it doesn't feel like you're being weighed down by their rather bulbous dimensions, and they're beautifully sculpted to sit comfortably in each hand, too. You just need to watch out when you're playing some of the Vive's more physical games, as a few wayward smash shots in #SelfieTennis that collided with our office's ceiling-mounted projector actually managed to scuff the surface of the controllers.

Most of the time you'll simply be moving them about to control whatever you're playing, but there's also a trigger button round the back that sits at just the right height for your index finger, and two grip buttons on either side which are within easy reach of your respective middle fingers.

There's also a circular trackpad on the front between its dashboard and power buttons. This can be used for all sorts of different things, such as scrolling through the SteamVR dashboard, or activating menu wheels to let you change gun or whatever item's currently assigned to that hand.  

HTC hasn't skimped on the controllers' battery life either. While it currently estimates a run-time of up to four hours on a single charge, I managed to go way beyond this over the course of a couple of days. It's easy to check, too, as hopping into the SteamVR dashboard will show you four, virtual LED lights at the bottom of each controller, giving you a rough estimate of how long you've got left before you need to return them to the mains.

Best games and demos

Of course, having the world's best VR headset means nothing if there aren't any good games to play on it, and it's here where the Vive comes a little undone. While there are a few absolutely brilliant games out there on Steam at the moment, the vast majority of them are either still in Early Access – a kind of extended beta stage where players can play the game while it's still being developed – or are limited to short, free demo levels.

Only a couple of games are what you'd traditionally recognise as being full, retail-style releases, such as Owlchemy Labs' Job Simulator: the 2050 Archives and Northway Games' Fantastic Contraption (both of which are truly excellent), and it's telling when most of its games don't yet cost much more than £15 that the development side behind Vive hasn't quite managed to move much beyond its kind of pre-release, early adopter phase yet.

That's not to say there aren't any games worth playing on the Vive, but out of the ones I tried, I haven't yet found that 'must-have' system seller that would really make me want to spend £689 right this second. For instance, many of my favourite VR games, from VRUnicorns' #SelfieTennis to i-Illusions' Space Pirate Trainer, trade on the same kind of instant pick-up and play feeling that Nintendo tapped into with its Wii console.

#SelfieTennis, for instance, sees you using both hands to play virtual tennis against yourself (a successful hit will transport you onto the other side of the court in roughly the right area where the ball's going to land), while Space Pirate Trainer puts you in the shoes (or should that be space boots?) of a gun-toting space cowboy fending off lethal flying security drones. They both require you to move about and use each hand to play, and they're both great introductions to what room-scale VR can really offer over more stationary headsets.

^ #SelfieTennis is wonderfully surreal, and you can even tweet the titular selfies you take using the Vive's grip buttons straight to Twitter

Space Pirate Trainer is particularly physical once you start hitting higher waves of oncoming enemies, and I'd happily trade this kind of experience over the next Call of Duty game any day. However, both this and #SelfieTennis are only limited to high score leader boards at the moment, so it's difficult to say whether they'll be able to sustain that initial novelty factor when they launch as full games later in the year, or whether they'll suffer the same fate as games like Wii Sports and end up sitting at the bottom of your Steam library with only an hour's worth of play to their name. 

Read more about our top VR game picks in our Best HTC Vive games article

Valve's The Lab is another brilliant example of what's essentially a set of glorified tech demos, but at least this one's free and is packed with lots of classic Portal gags to make you smile at the same time. While some of its 'pocket universes' are better than others, the one thing The Lab absolutely nails is how to move around in virtual reality beyond the bounds of your designated play area.

With a press of the touchpad, you can place a movable marker on the ground to indicate where you'd like to go next, and releasing it will instantly transport you there. It's wonderfully intuitive, and it feels incredibly natural, too, and I really hope more developers utilise this kind of travel system in the future to take us to more exciting, fully-fledged worlds that really boggle the imagination. 

In fact, if any game is going to sell you on buying the Vive, it's Neat Corporation's Budget Cuts, a stealth game that goes way beyond the kind of Wii Sports novelty factor present in other Vive titles and fully immerses you in the world around you. Again, only the first level is playable at the moment, but this is definitely the kind of game that room-scale VR was made for.

^ In The Lab's Longbow universe, you use both controllers to fire a bow and arrow to prevent oncoming enemies from storming your castle

Using a similar kind of movement system as The Lab, Budget Cuts sees you working your way round a high-security office complex full of deadly robots in order to retrieve your job application. The trick is that every time you place a new movement marker, you're presented with a small preview portal of where you're about to land, allowing you to rethink your strategy if you're about to accidentally throw yourself in front a roaming sentry bot, for example.

You can even, quite literally, crawl around in the air vents and snipe your foes from afar. You'll get a prompt telling you to crouch if your intended landing point is a bit short on headspace. It's by far the most immersive VR experience I've ever had, and the fact that I was essentially wriggling around on my carpet muttering to myself – much to the amusement of my other half – didn't really matter, so immersed was I in the task at hand.

Can it surVive?

Yet, even the sheer brilliance of Budget Cuts isn't quite enough to make that initial outlay of £689 more palatable - at least for now. You do get a lot more for your money with the Vive than other VR headsets, but I still need to see some properly killer (not to mention finished) games and must-have VR titles before I can definitely be persuaded to part with my cash.

Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption are both excellent in their own right, but unless you really like puzzle games or don't mind replaying Job Simulator's handful of levels multiple times, you'll be hard-pressed to fill the time with other games until the next big wave of games arrive later this autumn.

I’d strongly recommend you try the Vive given a chance – particularly now that Harrods, participating Dixons Carphone (formerly Currys PC World) stores, Overclockers UK and Scan Computers now have actual in-store demo pods where you can go and try it out for yourself – but the chicken-and-egg problem of content and users has become much more of an issue now that the headset has finally launched.

This is a shame, as Vive is by far the best VR headset I've tried so far, and it's definitely the one I'd want to buy once it has some decent games, even despite the difficulties that come with setting it up. In the long run, Vive certainly has an excellent chance of success, but when the Oculus Rift and £349 PlayStation VR are so much cheaper and easier to start using, Vive really needs to start making a compelling case with more advanced software to make it the number one destination for VR instead of a close second best. We'd love to give Vive an award for innovation but with the current software line-up we simply can't give it our Recommended award at this point in time.