HTC Vive is surprisingly comfortable. Everything felt quite snug on my face, the headphones provided went with the headset fine, and the controllers were simple to use. They had a circular touchpad that you could click where your thumbs rest and triggers on the back. After the twenty-something minutes of demos I wasn't uncomfortable at all. I wore glasses, because I only had one contact on and they said that my glasses would be a better bet, and the headset accommodated those perfectly.
The actual experience was pretty great too. I could move my head as quickly or slowly as I wanted and the headset kept up with me the entire time, and in the small space I had (imagine a 12 ft x 12 ft area) I could walk around with everything acting as expected. The headset has a cyan grid appear that says the cameras in the room are detecting you're going to hit a wall and to head back. The resolution isn't sharp, per se, but it's extremely effective at getting the image across. It feels like walking up to a 720p TV and going very close as you could easily see pixels. Some font was unreadable, I'd imagine what constitutes size 12 font in Word was straight up undecipherable here. Anything otherwise looked great. I'd imagine porn in this would be dope, though resolution again could affect the image.
I did four separate demos:
1) Here I was on the deck of a ship that had sank to the bottom of the ocean. This was awesome as a first experience for virtual reality. I walked around a bit, played with some fish, but the kicker was the whale that appeared seemingly right in front of me. The effect was quite well realized. I felt its daunting size and slow demeanor, my god. It was an awesome moment. The whole underwater setting was beautifully chilling with its deep blues and the attention to detail on the sunken ship. Walking around on it was great.
2) The second demo was being a worker in 2050. This was a cubicle scattered with various objects found in a workspace. I found a small cuckoo desktop piece I messed around with, along with other objects my robot boss gave me to do as a task. This meant I had to take a cart in front of me, get a donut with the controller and put it to my mouth to eat it, and then make coffee with a machine. Then I plugged in my computer, typed in a password (which was "101;" my keyboard humorously only had only two buttons on it, 0 and 1), and read emails. Again, all of this was done by looking around, moving, and using the controllers to interact with things. I had to also open up a drawer and fire two workers. Seeing two cartoon robot workers explain their perils as they cross your cubicle in VR is quite funny, in a slightly grim way.
3) Here I just painted. I got a bunch of brush types and colors with my left controller's touchpad that were displayed on different sides of a cube. I used the touchpad to rotate the cube, then my right controller (my brush) to pick an option. Painting in a virtual reality space is so great because you're painting in a different dimension. I tried making a simple tree - brown trunk and green top - and saw that what looked flat from the angle I painted it at was actually quite messy at a different, as my strokes were all done in a messy fashion. It's a hard experience to describe, but VR generally is.
4) My last demo was messing with the blue co-op partner from Portal. They said I had to reassemble him, but what it really was was an set piece where they show a bunch of parts inside him, and you're supposed to just oggle from different angles. The attention to detail here was amazing, every little piece looked painfully crafted for what's the inside of a video game character. Also seeing him up close was awesome. Awesome, but not as awesome as SEEING GLADOS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE.
TL;DR try out HTC Vive if you can.
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