On Thursday the new Perth chapter of the Australian Virtual Reality Network (AVRN: http://avrn.net.au/) met and were going to do demos of the HTC Vive.
They Skyped with the Sydney chapter who apparently have 80-100 attend the monthly meetings.
The Sydney speaker (leader of StartVR) showed his project and he and another developer ranked the VIVE their favorite, the Samsung Gear best of the phone-based VR (and I did not realize it comes bundled with the Samsung S7 phone, the phone acting as a form of external graphics processor to the display) and the Rift now showing its age and Google Cardboard (really just cardboard box around an android or iOS phone) good as $5 marketing/corporate handouts. They are most interested in the upcoming Playstation 4 HMD, as it works with existing Playstations (not the older version I assume) and hence will have a large ready market.
I instead then left this rather corporate group for the other meeting, a game developer launch -LEVEL ONE [http://www.levelone.org.au/[ at 167 Fitzgerald St Perth, a more indie game incubator/studio/community that has some connection to Film TV Interactive and the State Library.
A local game company had a music interface game in the VIVE which I played with and I quite liked the setup, good resolution, head tracking and very light responsive controllers I thought.
I did not ask how easy it is to develop for and am quite interested.
Ear Zow Digital