Sony’s new VR headset squares off with the Oculus Rift

The Oculus Rift is still in development kit form, but for a dev kit that aims to offer virtual reality in the living room for a relatively affordable $300 price tag, the device actually delivers. Your less tech savvy friends may not have heard of the Rift yet — and it doesn’t exactly have an impressive catalog of officially supported software — but the buzz surrounding the device is strong and loud. In fact, that buzz is so strong and loud that Sony has taken to developing a Rift competitor of its own.

Sony’s headset, the HMZ-T3Q, is actually the newest iteration in a line of theater virtualization headsets. Last year, Sony offered the HMZ-T3W headset at $1,000 per unit. Both units have similar specs and capabilities — personal headsets that simulate watching a screen that measures 700 to 750 inches in size from around 65 feet away. With the previous model, Sony aimed for the market of customers that would like a theater-sized experience when watching media, but didn’t have theater-sized space to set up the appropriate hardware. The headset allows you to have that giant screen and crisp 7.1 surround sound sitting on your face, so you can conceivably live in a tiny New York City-style shoe box of a room, but not miss out on an extravagant in-home media experience. The new model shown at CES 2014 this week takes somewhat of an aim at the Oculus Rift, as Sony touted the head-tracking capabilities of the HMZ-T3Q, and noted that it’s not only compatible with movies and TV, but video games as well.