Hands-On: HTC Vive Vs. PlayStation VR - 7 Key Aspects Compared

4. Responsiveness

The directness of interaction plays a big part in how immersive your VR experience will be. If you pick something up, you want it to happen instantaneously with when you press the button to do so. If you move your hand, there should be no delay in your virtual hand moving on-screen. Based on the demos I played, the Vive holds a slight edge in this department. When I played the puzzle game in which I was assembling a contraption to guide a ball to its target, I found myself having too much fun just messing around with the parts to bother making anything remotely practical (I'm no good at DIY without an IKEA manual). I swung the bars around my head, shortened them, stretched them, then pretended I was a kendo-stick-wielding martial arts expert (while looking like a complete fool to any outsiders). In The Getaway sequence of PlayStation VR, in which I had to use an uzi to fend off a bunch of biked hoodlums on a motorway, I ran into a few technical hitches. It felt like the gun was trailing the movement of my hands slightly, and occasionally, my hand in-game would just lose the plot and glitch to some awkward position at the edge of the screen. I'm sure these issues will be resolved come launch day, but it suggests to me that the PlayStation VR development is coming along more slowly than Vive's.