This year, virtual reality is becoming a reality, and while Samsung's Gear VR is already out and Sony "Project Morpheus" (now officially designated as the much more banal "PlayStation VR") is on the way, the PC gamers with powerful enough rigs will have a tough choice of VR headsets to make this coming spring: Should you buy Facebook's Oculus Rift or HTC / Valve's Vive?

Here's a comparative rundown highlighting the similarities and differences between the two leading first-generation VR systems for PC, based on what we know so far -- and a couple of educated guesses.

Oculus Rift vs. HTC Vive

Release Date

After Samsung's phablet-based Gear VR hit the store shelves in time for the holidays in 2015, preorders for Facebook's Oculus Rift were announced to begin on Jan. 6, 2016. The Oculus Rift will begin shipping on Mar. 28, 2016, followed by availability in "limited locations at select retailers" starting in April.

The HTC Vive, as Latin Post reported this week, was just announced for preorders starting on Leap Day, or Feb. 29, 2016. HTC said the Vive would go on wider sale starting in April, so presumably preorders should be shipping by then or a little before. HTC also would not set a firm release date.

So except for preorders, there doesn't appear to be a big difference between the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive's wider release date windows. It's safe to say if you really want VR, you'll have it by May either way -- if you can afford it.

Price

Being an early adopter of ground breaking first-generation technologies like VR in 2016 isn't cheap. Neither are the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, from what we've seen so far.

Both Oculus and HTC have kept the price of their first commercial VR products close to the chest, but based on a leaked Amazon UK listing for the Oculus Rift, it looks like that headset will cost about $600 in U.S. dollars. Of course, if you originally backed Oculus on Kickstarter, you'll get one for free.

For the rest of us, $600 will pay for a headset, along with its built-in headphones, a tracking sensor, an Oculus Remote (for media) and an Xbox One controller -- but it looks like the special Oculus Touch controllers will be sold separately, for a yet-unknown price.

Considering that the Facebook-backed Oculus Rift is reportedly being sold at cost, you can expect the HTC Vive -- which hasn't been given a price tag yet -- to cost at least as much as the Rift, and probably more.

Specs and Sensor Differences

Digital Trends ran down the specs of the Oculus Rift and the latest publicly available version of the HTC Vive (i.e., some things could change), and from a basic technical perspective, they're very similar to each other.

Both use an OLED display with 2160 x 1200p resolution with a 90Hz refresh rate. Both headsets provide a 110 degree field of view. Both will ostensibly feature built-in audio, and both use HDMI and USB 3.0 connections.

As for differences in specs, the Oculus Rift has a built-in mic, while it's not yet known whether there will be one in the HTC Vive.

But the most important difference is in the sensor design. The Oculus Rift has a separate 360-degree positional tracking sensor, along with an accelerometer and gyroscope on the headset, that correlates the VR world with your head movements.

This design, as Oculus Rift's creator Palmer Lucky has repeatedly told us, means its virtual reality immersion is a "seated experience."

"Users shouldn't stand up. They could hurt themselves, and we don't want to be liable for that," said Lucky. But what he didn't say is that the Rift is incapable of reproducing accurate VR correlations to moving around the room.

The HTC Vive is different. Built into the headset is a laser position sensor, similar in concept to the Microsoft Hololens's Kinect-based room scanning.

This means the headset tracks your movement relative to the room, making it possible to stand up and walk around, all while the software correlates the virtual world to your movement (and warns you if you approach a wall in the physical world). The HTC Vive is said to allow about a 15 x 15-foot area of movement.

The bottom line, as many early hands on reviewers have put it, is that the relatively late-in-the-game SteamVR with the HTC Vive may beat Oculus at its own game.

PC Requirements (The True Cost of VR)

Before you jump online to pledge your loyalty to the Oculus Rift or eagerly anticipate Leap Day to leap into the HTC Vive, there's one big thing to consider: Can your PC even run a VR system?

The true cost of buying an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive is the rig you run it on, and as Latin Post previously noted, the PC (and GPU) you use will have to be about seven times more powerful than the average home PC. Only about one percent of personal computers expected to be in use this year will be that powerful.

HTC hasn't released the specs requirements for its headset, but we can safely gauge that they're in the same ballpark as the Rift. Thankfully, Oculus has provided official recommended specs, which includes some new, pricey components:

GPU: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater

CPU: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater

RAM: 8GB or more

Video: HDMI 1.3 video output

Ports: 3 USB 3.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 port

OS: Windows 7 SP1 64-bit or later

On its website, Oculus provides a compatibility app you can run on your Windows PC to find out if it's up to the task.

Even more helpful, the company has partnered with Dell, ASUS, and Alienware on a range of "Oculus ready" PCs. Each starts at about $1000, in case you've just been inspired to fatten up that piggy bank before spring.