Tom Parkinson • 2 minutes ago
As a white supremacist and Nazi sympathiser I applaud the effort to tell people what they can and can't find funny, letting us racists claim our phrase back from these jokers.

Just the other day we heard that Valve is getting ready to put out its SteamVR headset. HTC is making it, it's called the HTC Vive and it'll be out—for real—by the end of the year. Game on, Oculus.

Unlike other virtual reality headsets, which have surfaced as early prototypes with a developer version off on the horizon, the HTC Vive is virtually done. Yes, there is still a developer kit on the way (this spring) but HTC and Valve are swearing up and down that the real one will come out before year's end.

What's more, Valve and HTC seem to have figured out the controller problem: The HTC Vive comes with a motion tracking system that can cover an entire room, along with a pair of wireless "VR controllers," that HTC claims are simple and intuitive, without much more in the way of details. From the way HTC describes them, they might be gloves? It's hard to tell.

The end result, though, is that the HTC Vive and SteamVR are intended to be a far more holodeck-y experience than the Rift, which Oculus has stressed on multiple occasions is a sit-down device, at least in the first generation. HTC and Valve want you to get up and walk around; it's intended to be part of the experience. Though from what we've seen it looks like, the headset itself isn't wireless, which is a bit of a constraint.