When I first strapped on my Oculus Rift goggles, I was inadvertently buried 6 feet underground. I had just spent an hour setting up this $599 first-of-its-kind virtual reality rig, which arrives in living rooms this week. Something had gone awry with the sensor that tells the Rift where I am.  Standing on my tiptoes, I could peer out of my virtual hole to briefly glimpse the incredible 3-D landscape that welcomes new Rift owners.  That experience defines this moment of truth for Oculus, and the VR mass hysteria it’s been fueling. The Rift demonstrates flashes of a brilliant future where we can move freely through countless virtual worlds. But even after I fixed the sensor glitch, a week with the Rift showed me it still needs to dig itself out of some deep holes.  Oculus Rift is the 2016 product you hope your neighbor buys. You’ll definitely want to try it, but there’s little reason to own one unless you’re a serious gamer. I’m not talking about Candy Crush addicts, or even most of us with a PlayStation at home. Oculus Rift only works with high-end gaming PCs—the recommended Asus model I tested costs $1,449 and requires not one but two power plugs. No Macs will do.  Are you champing at the bit to blow up spaceships in 360 degrees like in the Rift’s marquee game “Eve: Valkyrie”? My colleague Nathan Olivarez-Giles was, so I shared the review Rift unit with him to widen my perspective. (You can read his take for gamers here.) At launch, the Rift’s software store is mostly games.  The tension is this: While the first Rift to arrive in homes is clearly a gaming device, Mark Zuckerberg of Oculus owner Facebook FB 0.65 % keeps telling the world it’s much, much more—the “next major computing and communication platform.”  Yet to become the next smartphone or Facebook, the Rift needs to be transformative. I’d gladly spend upward of $2,000 for my very own teleporter. Strap on a headset and suddenly I can scale Mount Everest, play with my nephew 3,000 miles away or beam into an enduring imaginary world? Bring it on. But while the Rift sometimes made me smile or duck, I never laughed, cried or felt moved, like I have with many plain-old movies.  It will take some time for VR storytellers to figure out this craft. But the Rift itself, while an engineering marvel, still just isn’t that good at convincing you you’re in an alternate reality. After the novelty wears off, using the 1.5-pound headset is about as awkward as sleeping on an airplane. It’s hard to avoid feeling queasy when virtual scenes move without your actual body. I couldn’t even last one entire race in “Project Cars,” a racing simulator. (Oculus rates apps based on comfort: Our favorite zombie-hunting game, “Into the Dead,” all but forces you to stop and take breaks.)  The most awkward part isn’t nausea—it’s a 13-foot cable snaking from the back of your head to the PC, a tether eerily similar to one in “The Matrix.” To avoid tripping, you must keep track of this cable’s location like a never-ending game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.  There’s already another VR rig that doesn’t have a tether—and it costs a fraction of the Rift. Samsung’s $100 Gear VR, made in partnership with Oculus, is powered by a smartphone that you physically insert in front of two lenses. The extra costs of the Rift (monetary and otherwise) would be justified if its image quality were dramatically better than the Gear’s, but it isn’t. Both are like looking through a screen door. The Rift’s main screen advantage is that it refreshes faster, which Oculus says helps alleviate motion sickness and a flickering sensation some experience.  So then what’s all the fuss about? Rift is the first consumer rig you can use to move around inside virtual space—phone-based VR just lets you spin 360 degrees. You can walk around a virtual tree, jump to see over the horizon or step up to a ledge and look at what lies below.  This is undeniably cool. The best use of the tech is a short feature called “The Rose and I,” which lets you walk around a tiny asteroid, taking in different views of its adorable residents.  Gaming in a virtual room means exploring new perspectives on the action. “Lucky’s Tale” and “Chronos” offer you a God’s-eye-view, where you can look down at the action like an invisible giant. Nathan was most engrossed with “Into The Dead,” where you run, first-person, through a field of zombies, using a chain saw to clear a path. But he felt sick after 20 minutes of dogfighting in “Eve: Valkyrie,” spinning around inside a spaceship’s cockpit.  When there’s so much filling your periphery, it isn’t always clear what to look at, and apps are inconsistent on this. Most just make sure the action is concentrated in “front”—toward the sensor tracking your position. There isn’t even much purpose to 360-degree immersion in titles like “Lucky’s Tale.” Many games would have been nearly as fun on a big TV with surround sound.  The other problem when you’re inside another world is that you want to interact with it—poke an alien, swing a lightsaber—using your hands. On the Rift, you just pass through objects like a ghost. Oculus is building Touch hand motion controllers for grabbing and moving virtual objects, but they won’t be available until later this year. Oculus hasn’t announced pricing yet.  Rival HTC’s $799 Vive VR system, due on April 5, will include motion controllers and two sensors for better tracking. Sony SNE 0.43 % ’s PlayStation VR, coming in October for $399 and compatible with millions of consoles, also works with motion controllers.  Without them, you’re left operating the Rift with your face—your gaze acts as a kind of laser pointer—and a wireless Xbox game controller. But since you can’t just look down and see the controller’s 16 buttons, you need a gamer’s muscle memory. The Rift comes with a second, smaller remote for basic tasks, but like much of the Rift experience, it isn’t nearly as simple as it could be.  And let’s not forget, there’s still a Windows PC in the middle of this, which comes with its own challenges. I had to manually update graphics drivers. Even on my powerful, optimized-for-Oculus test model, the visuals on some games would stutter occasionally.  Everyone talks about VR’s sensory overload, but the most troubling part for me was the sensory deprivation. It’s a blindfold. You need to clear an area to move around, yet the Rift doesn’t do a very good job of telling you when you’re nearing the edges. Unless we start building adult playpens, teeth will be lost on the sides of coffee tables. Oculus warns users during setup to “allow adequate space all around and above you” and that “loss of balance may occur.”  When I’m on the inside, I also can’t shake a feeling of paranoia. There’s no way to tell what people around you are saying and doing. The Rift needs a button you press to automatically reveal your immediate surroundings. (Oculus designers and engineers are already thinking about this.)  Another big-picture VR problem: It’s boring to be around people who are using it. Remember when you got a Nintendo NTDOY 0.00 % Wii and invited people over for doubles tennis? Nathan came over to my house to play with the Rift, and we ignored each other for hours while he pawed at the air in silence. You can play Rift games with friends over the Internet but, despite being developed by Facebook, it offers few other ways to connect with people.  I believe the Rift experience will make quantum leaps in fun and usefulness in the years ahead, especially with the arrival of the Touch controllers.  But I don’t believe that this particular Rift hardware will last. New capabilities will require more-powerful processors and higher-resolution headsets—someday hopefully ones that work without wires. If you buy a Rift today, chances are you’ll be replacing it in the near future.  It’s Day One for the Rift, and I’m already ready for Version Two.  Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com or on Twitter @geoffreyfowler  In a few instances the Oculus Rift does work with laptops. A previous version of this story incorrectly said it doesn’t work with any laptops. (March 28, 2016)
The first totally immersive home virtual reality rig is a pricey, awkward, isolating—and occasionally brilliant—glimpse of the future of computing.