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?
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