Facebook recently released information about the price and release date of its Oculus Rift VR, coming this spring 2015. Now, HTC has made a similar announcement for its own VR headset in collaboration with gaming company Valve Software, the Vive VR.

Pre-orders for the two companies' vision of the next generation of virtual reality begin on leap day this year, February 29, 2015, as The Telegraph first reported. HTC's CEO Cher Wang told the news outlet that the company was planning to start accepting pre-orders on leap day, with the Vive VR's full release date set for sometime in April 2015.

The chief executive of Taiwanese smartphone and now VR headset manufacturer, HTC, wasn't ready to part with a lot of other details about the release, including the price.

But as Tech Insider reasoned, given the "at cost" selling price of the Vive VR's chief competitor, Facebook's Oculus Rift, which is north of $600 without accessories, one could peg the cost of the HTC Vive VR somewhere between the Oculus Rift and the four-figure mark. One earlier leak of the Amazon listing for Sony PlayStation's VR headset put that price at $1125.

HTC, more known for making premium smartphones than gaming accessories, partnered with well-known U.S. cult gaming software company Valve to design and launch the Vive VR. The headset will work with Valve's gaming platform, Steam, which already has a catalogue of VR titles up and ready for sale.

When pre-orders begin in late February, of course, we'll have a clear idea of the price of HTC and Valve's virtual reality headset.

VR Will Cost More Than the Price Tag

But the true cost of acquiring and actually using any VR in 2015 will be much more than the price tag of the headset. To power the next-generation technology involved in immersive virtual reality (with the exception of the less-intense smartphone-powered Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard VR systems), you need a high-powered computer with one the latest graphics cards installed.

As CNET judged it recently, to get a strongly rendered VR experience up and running, you'll need a PC that's about seven times more powerful than the gaming PC you'd find in the average U.S. household -- or less than one percent of the computers expected to be in use this year.

With the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift finally making VR a reality this year, starting in the spring, those without the latest high-powered gaming PCs have a just few months left to start saving up the thousands of dollars they'll need to make the jump out of this reality.