We originally wrote a guide to preparing for VR last year, but with the Rift finally here, we've updated it with new information based on our time with both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. If you've ordered an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, your own personal headset may be rolling off a factory assembly line this very moment. Soon it will be placed in a box, packaged with a controller and sensor, loaded onto a ship or plane and delivered to your doorstep. Depending on when you ordered, your gateway to the world of VR is days, weeks, or a couple months away. You're almost ready to look as cool as the two guys on the old PC Gamer cover above. Depending on which headset you're getting, there are a few things you should do to prepare yourself. VR really can be immersive enough to make trick your brain into believing what it's seeing, which is awesome for games but not so awesome for lamps you could knock over, soda cans you could spill, or shins you could bash on coffee tables. It's a dangerous world out there, so you'll want to do a little prep work before you dive into VR. Your PC will need some prepwork as well. We'll give you some tips on making sure your system is spick and span and optimized for VR. If you're prepared in advance, you'll be ready to start gaming a few minutes after you get your fancy new headset. Right now the space requirements for SteamVR and the Oculus Rift differ significantly. You don't need much space at all for the Rift: it ships with one sensor ideal for sitting or standing mostly still, and the are built around the Xbox One controller. You won't be walking around right now. It may require some real living room rearrangement if you plan on standing up and walking around. And trust us, you want to—nothing sells the feeling of immersion more than walking in virtual reality. Since the Oculus Rift has the simpler setup process, we'll start there. What kind of space will I need for the Oculus Rift? The tracking works by detecting infrared LEDs emitted from beneath the fabric covering of the Rift headset. Only one sensor will ship with the Rift headset, but multiple will be usable together to cover a larger room space. Avoid rugs and other tripping hazards. Definitely keep your desk and the area around your computer free of things easily knocked over or spilled, for the safety of your PC. That field of view is wide enough that you don't have to be positioned straight in front of it to use the Rift—in our experience, tracking is simple and reliable after simply placing the sensor on a desk pointed in our direction. When the motion controller is released sometime in Q2 of 2016, it will come with another sensor in the box. That will give you a bit more room to move around, and allow you to turn around without losing tracking, depending on your placement of the sensor. Keep in mind you'll need a second surface to place or mount this sensor to. Desk setup: Nothing much specific here, but do yourself a favor and clear off room on your desk or table for your VR accessories to live. When you don the Rift, you won't be able to see the controller and included Oculus remote, so you'll have to pick them up by touch. And that's much, much easier to do when you have a clear space in front of you and can reach out to the same place every time to grab what you're looking for. Similarly, it's nice to have a cleared space to place the headset when you take it off. Be careful with it! For standing, consider buying an anti-fatigue mat designed for standing desks. This won't really be necessary for the Rift's launch, though. As we wrote above, all the launch games are built around a sitting experience. For seated VR games—pretty much the only games available through the Oculus Store right now—it's nice to have a swivel chair. A wheeled office chair will work, but swiveling may inadvertently cause you to roll around, too, if you're on hardwood. But plenty of Rift games encourage looking around 360 degrees and finding hidden delights behind you. We haven't had much of an issue with the Oculus Rift on this front, since we're mostly seated and gripping an Xbox controller. What kind of space will I need for the HTC Vive? Valve wants you to walk around in virtual reality. The base stations can cover a play area of about 4x3 meters, and need to be positioned above head height. If you have some bookshelves in your living room, those will probably be perfect mount points. Otherwise, you might be looking at wall-mounting. Sensor setup: The Vive's Lighthouse sensors need to be placed in opposing corners to offer perfect tracking without the risk of occlusion. From our experience, you can probably get away with the sensors not being mounted at at perfect diagonal; it'll just affect the size of your play space. The sensors are too heavy to mount to the wall using some kind of sticky material and we wouldn't recommend heavy-duty glue , so keep in mind that you may want to purchase if you don't have a convenient bookshelf to place each sensor on. Desk setup: Nothing much specific here, but do yourself a favor and clear off room on your desk or table for your VR accessories to live. In press demos, we have the luxury of someone handing us the Vive's motion controllers; when you're playing games at home, you'll be feeling around in the dark for those controllers. Empty space on your desk or table, where you can reliably reach to find your controllers, will prevent accidental spills and fumbling. For standing, consider buying an anti-fatigue mat designed for standing desks. Unfortunately there's no great solution for dealing with the Vive's cable while walking around; when we spoke with Palmer Luckey, he recommended against a ceiling-bungee solution, because there's always a risk that you'll smack the cable when waving your arm and rip the headset from your head. But the baseline for acceptable VR performance is going to be much, much higher. Right now, you might be satisfied with 1080p, 60 frames per second performance. SteamVR and the consumer Oculus Rift both use a pair of 1080x1200 displays being refreshed at 90 Hz. What kind of rig will you need to handle that? For the Oculus Rift, there are two hard requirements: a system with at least two USB 3. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your videocard, and make sure your USB drivers are up-to-date, too. You could save a few milliseconds of latency by updating an out-of-date driver. Developers working with the Vive hardware have recommended an Nvidia GTX 980, a step up in performance past the GTX 970. You can run to see if your rig is up to par. As DirectX 12 launches with Windows 10, many developers are likely to switch over to the API from DirectX 11. But it won't be a quick change. Don't expect to see many DX12 games before 2017. Still, that makes a DX12 compatible graphics card important. Thankfully, DX12 support extends back to the last 2-3 years of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, although some DX12 features are limited to newer cards. We'll have a more specific guide to the Oculus Rift setup process soon, but it's pretty easy—if you've done all of the above, you can set it up in just a couple minutes. What else do you need? Q: Do I need to buy a controller for the Oculus Rift? A: The Oculus Rift will ship with an Xbox One controller, but you should be able to use an Xbox 360 or DualShock 4 pad in its place if you prefer. The Oculus Touch controller releases later, in the second half of 2016, and will be a separate purchase. Q: Do I need to buy a controller for the HTC Vive? A: Valve has designed a pair of wand motion controllers for the Vive. Q: How much does all this cost? A: , plux tax and shipping. Q: Will any VR game work on any VR headset? All of the games Oculus is developing and funding will be sold through the Oculus Home storefront, which means those games will likely never show up on Steam. Games made specifically for SteamVR will, of course, be on Steam. The rest is still a bit up in the air. Oculus maintains that it wants to support open source development, and some games will be playable on multiple VR platforms, but hardware differences will require some unique programming. But we expect to see most third-party VR games appear on both platforms to maximize profits. Elite: Dangerous is the first game to support both headsets at launch. Q: Will I be able to use my VR headset for more than gaming? Virtual tourism may be a more compelling use of VR than gaming, someday. Oculus Home already hosts a cinema for watching movies in vision-filling VR and apps for panoramic photos and videos. We expect more VR media to appear once more headsets are released. Even John Carmack thinks that gaming will represent less than 50% of the eventual content for VR. Q: Am I going to get motion sick? A: Hopefully not, but it's possible. Some games are much more likely to induce motion sickness. If you're sensitive, here's a good rule of thumb: avoid any game that moves your field of view with an analog stick. It feels unnatural, because you're separating control of your vision from your actual head movements. Fast-moving games with lots of acceleration and deceleration can also make you sick. If you're worried, start out with third-person games with limited camera movement, like AirMech and Chronos on the Rift, and see how you do. 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