Ever since the unveiling of the HTC Vive, much has been made of its unique space requirements. The VR system is meant to deliver what HTC and Valve call "room-size experiences"---as you'd suspect, that means you'll need to prep an entire room to serve as your VR playpen.
Coffee tables? Sectional couches? Get rid of them. Lamps and bookshelves? Better safe than sorry. You'll also need to find space on your walls to mount a pair of motion-sensing Lighthouse base stations. These small black cubes need to be able to determine your position in the physical room so they can place you in a specific location inside the virtual world. To keep things accurate, HTC recommends you mount the Lighthouse cubes at least six feet, five inches off the floor.
It's not an insane amount of room prep, but many potential buyers may be turned off by the list of necessary steps---especially since other VR headsets are basically plug-and-play. HTC says it should take around 30 minutes to complete a by-the-book set up the Vive. Watch our timelapse video, and you can see that's pretty close. It took us just over half an hour to go from unboxing to mounting to calibration to playing games.
We hit some snags. Registering with HTC while using the TV as a monitor was tough, mostly because verifying through Steam proved impossible and we had to verify with Google. We also had to jerry-rig a mount that tilted the lighthouse stations downward 30 to 45 degrees. We had to track down a DisplayPort mini-to-DisplayPort cable---the problem there is that most graphics cards only have one HDMI port, and if you're using that port to run your TV as a monitor, then you still need to find a way to connect the headset to your PC. There were also some problems getting the headset to boot because we had two versions of Steam open (one app, and one in the browser). If we hadn't hit those bumps, we would have gotten it going in less time.
The HTC Vive bundle costs $799, and that includes a headset, a pair of Lighthouse base stations, and two hand controllers. Headphones are BYO, and they plug into the cable running out of the back of the headset. And of course, you'll need a VR-ready PC to run it, too. The Vive ships this week, and you can purchase one for your newly barren living room at HTCVive.com.
