We purchased the HTC Vive so that our expert reviewer could thoroughly test and review it. Read on for our full product review.

Anyone considering VR will hear a lot about the HTC Vive, one of the first commercially available headsets of this generation. There are several considerations with VR: sound quality, display quality, available game library. The Vive has them all, and potential buyers will be happy with the Vive, even if it is outperformed in quality and value by other headsets.

HTC has packed more than three dozen sensors into the Vive for motion and spatial tracking. They work in conjunction with the base stations, which are cube-shaped IR laser emitters. To secure the headset, the Vive uses elastic hook-and-loop straps that wrap around your head. They’re fairly flexible, so they can accommodate a wide range of head shapes, but this choice of mechanism has given the Vive a weight bias that can cause the headset to sag over time. Additionally, even though the Vive uses a lot of cables, the link box does a good job of keeping them organized. You don’t have to worry about the Vive’s cable being too short; at 15 feet, it’s more than enough for most play spaces.

The Vive controllers, formally called the Vive Controllers and informally the Vive Wands, are a product of their time. Since their release, many more ergonomic offerings have hit the VR market, but none have been compatible with the Vive headset.