HTC Vive provides the VR experience I've been dying to have at home. If you feel like splurging, have the space for Room Scale and are invested enough to drill holes into your walls, by all means, it's a truly immersive experience that you can't miss.

Incredibly immersive; Room Scale VR; Comfortable headset; Superb tracking; Front facing camera

Very expensive; Need lots of room for Room Scale; Set-up may involve holes in walls; Slight stuttering; Games aren't polished

It asks more of you than Oculus does, but Vive also rewards you with an even more immersive, transformative VR experience

Room-scale is the best kind of VR; Motion controllers make you feel even more immersed; Steam support means it's easier to get games

Heavier; less secure on your bonce than Oculus Rift; Fiddly firmware and a mess of cables; Currently lacking fully formed games

It's hard to compare the HTC Vive to anything. It doesn't have the games of the Oculus Rift yet, but the Vive's take on virtual reality is best in breed. No other VR headsets offer such an immersive virtual reality experience that you can wander around it, poke stuff and genuinely lose yourself in...

Room-scale VR is the one to beat; Excellent; intuitive controllers; Comfortable and well-designed headset

Not enough content; A bit laborious to set up; Expensive

The HTC Vive is the sci-fi, virtual reality future we've all been waiting for, but if developers and content creators don't embrace it, all the technological innovation in the world won't save it from the scrapheap.

Incredibly immersive

Expensive; Requires a lot of space; Cabling can be awkward; Lack of stand-out games and apps

At the end of my testing period with the Vive, as I look at it on my desk and consider how much I will use it now that I do not have to for work, I find myself in a bit of a love/hate relationship with it.

Room scale is hands down; the best VR experience you can have; Motion controllers make interaction in VR natural; Tracking is almost flawless with proper sensor placement; Chaperone gives you confidence to move around in VR; Headset is comfortable over long play sessions; Zero motion sickness...

Clearing space can be a pain; especially in smaller British homes – but it is worth it; Set up can be a bit fiddly; Steam VR still crashes; Lens contours can occasionally be seen in scenes with bright light sources; Headset weighting needs improvement; Crisp; bright screen makes pixels a little more...

The HTC Vive is up against the Oculus Rift and Sony's PlayStation VR in the race to be the best and most successful virtual reality headset. I'll say right here and now that as a piece of technology, it probably is the best, but that as a consumer device, it probably won't be the most successful.

Brilliantly immersive; Can be worn at length; Plenty of good games

Neither cheap nor simple; Inevitably bulky & cumbersome; Very few great games

If you have the budget, the HTC Vive is the best virtual reality experience on the market, bar none.

Best VR experience; Intuitive controls; Software partnership with Valve

Still a bit pricey; Requires a high-end GPU, Less comfortable than the Rift

I realize I'm not sure where I am, literally speaking. I know where I am virtually. A miniature golf course The bottom of the ocean A demented office filled with robots. My little home office became all these things in the middle of the night. I walked through these worlds with my feet.

The HTC Vive offers a flat-out amazing virtual reality experience with sharp visuals, great motion controls and full-room sensing to walk around in virtual space; Vive hardware can help indicate where your walls are, and an in-helmet camera can be used to see your space with the headset on

It requires a high-end PC to run; Long wires and lots of equipment take time and space to set up; Steam VR offers a lot of software but it isn't always beginner-friendly

it's a wonderful bit of kit and while not perfect still blows anything else vr out of the water. feels surreal to use you have to try it to understand.

The creator of Audiosurf turns his rhythm action classic into one of the coolest games in the Vive virtual reality line-up.

A fun reinterpretation of classic rhythm action games; that looks great and has a potentially infinite music library

The gameplay gets repetitive very quickly, no matter how different the music is you use; Very buggy, particularly the menu interface