HTC Vive’s United Kingdom launch plans revealed. Price, date, pre-orders and games

That’s a little more than we thought – we’d previously guesstimated around the £650 mark.

HTC announced the high-end Vive virtual reality headset past year and it has already shipped two iterations of the headset to developers.

An official United Kingdom price for Valve‘s virtual reality headset has been announced, and pre-orders are set to start this afternoon. It’s expensive than the Oculus Rift headset but that was to be expected given the difference between the hardware of these VR headsets. Much like the Rift, HTC does have one stumbling block that Sony’s PlayStation VR doesn’t have to worry about (the need for a suitably powerful PC to run it off – the PS VR simply links up to your PS4). Pre-orders open tomorrow ahead of the release on April 5th.

Bundled with the HTC Vive VR pre-order will be VR apps the Fantastic Contraption, Job Simulator and Google’s Tilt Brush which can be seen in the video below. Don’t forget to check out our Hands on: HTC Vive review. HTC recommends the Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics cards, at minimum.

The HTC Vive features a head-mounted display and tracked controllers, allowing wearers to inspect objects from every angle and interact with their surroundings in virtual reality.

The smartwatch is rumored to have a round 360 x 360 display and to use Android Wear as its operating system.