VR Goggles

The bad news is that if you are looking for a full-fledged, polished, virtual reality experience, you need to be patient. It isn't quite here yet. By all appearances, it looks like it is going to arrive in Q1 of 2016 with the Oculus Rift consumer edition. The final version of the Rift, by all accounts, is going to be robust, easy to use, fast, comfortable to wear and revolutionary. A long list of game manufacturers are lined up to support it. But, that's still a little ways off.

For now, if you can't wait, you have three options:

Samsung Gear VR

Samsung offers "Gear VR" as an accessory to the Galaxy S6. You need to have that phone to use it. Or, if you have the Galaxy Note 4, you can use the Gear VR Innovator Edition. The "innovator" version being a beta project and the version that works with the Galaxy being a final product. Gear VR is probably the best option on the market right now, but only if you already have a compatible phone. They have quite a number of games in their marketplace. Of course, you're using it on your phone, not your PC, so this isn't a replacement for your monitor, it is a very cool toy you will get a lot of enjoyment out of playing with.

Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2

The Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2 is pretty amazing. A camera monitors how you turn your head and the view presented on the screen turns the way it would if you turned your head in the game. A number of games support it natively and a number more support it when combined with third party software like TriDef. It often takes a fair amount of tinkering to get it to work, and it often has some glitches, but it gives you a great idea of what this technology has to offer. That is important to note though- dev kit 2 is not how you're going to be playing your games from now on. It isn't intended to be that. The game support isn't there yet and the device still has some issues with lag and weight and vertigo. What dev kit 2 is for is showing you what VR is like for a relatively reasonable price of $350. You'll play with it for a few days, show it to your friends, then mostly put it back in a box until the consumer version comes out. That said, those will be a few pretty cool days and your friends will indeed be impressed.

Google Cardboard

Google put out instructions for how you can actually make your own VR goggles largely from things you already have at home, which is pretty cool. It is basically just your smartphone, a couple of lenses, and then some folded cardboard to hold it all in place. It certainly isn't something you would actually use to in place of your monitor, and it isn't nearly as good as the Oculus Rift dev kit 2, but it gives you a taste basically for free. The experience is kind of jarring at times, funny at times, and impressive at others. A great way to tide you over until Q1 of 2016.

You can get an idea of where this is all headed in the longer term by checking out this video of using the Oculus Rift, a Wii remote and the Cyberith Virtualizer all together. Pretty cool.