By Sascha Segan
BARCELONA—Does your house have a VR room? Maybe it should, because the Vive headset from Valve and HTC is the most immersive virtual reality experience I’ve seen yet. But man, does it take up a lot of space.
HTC strapped the giant Vive headset on me for half an hour so I could live in its world. It’s a big one, inside and out.
The Vive requires two laser-tracking boxes bolted up near the ceiling of a room, two nunchuk-like controllers (each with a touchpad, a trigger, and a flower-like bloom of sensors at the top), and the headset cabled to a Windows PC. Because it’s a fully interactive, walking-around experience, you need to clear out the furniture from the center of a room and try not to trip over the cable trailing back to the PC. HTC recommends a 15-by-15-foot space. The headset doesn’t feel heavier than a Samsung Gear VR, but it’s just a lot of equipment.
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