Lisa Martinez Gilpin, global head of news and publishing at Google Play, broke down the attributes of both virtual reality and augmented reality at the VR 20/20 opening session, and spelled out the roles both will play in the media going forward.

Augmented reality (AR) offers the user a “push and pull kind of dynamic,” she said, whereas virtual reality (VR) is more immersive.

Martinez Gilpin detailed Google’s history in VR, including 2014's Google Cardboard viewer, which she described as “simple with a lot of meaning.” She said a New York Times partnership a year later delivered more than 1 million Cardboard viewers to Times subscribers.

“Talk about coming into a really personal space,” she said. “We’re right there at your front door.”

Next was Daydream, offering a more breathable material than Cardboard. “There’s lots of great content to snack on,” said Martinez Gilpin, “as well as episodic content.”

VR 20/20 is happening Monday (Oct. 16) at the Stewart Hotel in Manhattan as the kick-off event of NYC Television Week.

Read More: Complete Coverage of VR 20/20

Martinez Gilpin said VR has a significant role in realms as varied as news and commerce. She spoke of “educating journalists to user VR cameras to tell their stories.”

Martinez Gilpin talked of ARCore, a platform for augmented reality apps. She described AR’s role in helping a consumer virtually try on clothing, or see how a coffee table fits in a family room, or check out a new car in different colors.

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Google’s Visual Positioning Service (VPS) can offer on-the-go consumers a look at a store’s layout before they visit. “It’s a great way to think about user flow,” she said, “and where products sit in store.”

VR, and AR, are part of the present, Martinez Gilpin suggested, not the future. “What used to take months now takes hours from a production standpoint,” she said. “It’s a lot more seamless and frictionless.”

HTC started to take pre-orders for the Vive today at 10 a.m. ET, introducing a virtual reality platform that will cost $799 and go head-to-head with the Oculus Rift.

HTC, which has also announced international pricing for the Vive (it’ll fetch C$1,149 in Canada, £689.00 in the U.K., and €899.00 across other parts of Europe, for example), said the pre-order package bundles in three VR titles: Fantastic Contraption, Job Simulator and Tilt Brush, a 3D painting system from Google. The Vive kit will also include two wireless controllers and a 360-degree tracking and room scale movement sensors.

HTC, which is limiting orders to one Vive unit per customer, said it expects to start shipping the Steam VR-powered platform on April 5.

Like the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive users must tether the platform to a high-octane PC (HTC recommends PCs with an Nvidia GeForce GTC 970/AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater GPU, Intel i5-4590/AMD FX 8350 or greater CPU, at least 4 gigabytes of RAM, and HDMI 1.4 or DisplayPort 1.2 or newer video outputs).

Out of the chute, the HTC Vive will be a bit pricier than the Oculus Rift, which opened preorders on January 6 and starts at $599. Earlier this month, Oculus started to take pre-orders on Oculus-ready PCs and Rift bundles that start at $1,499.

Samsung, meanwhile, is trying to prime the virtual reality pump by bundling the Oculus-powered Gear VR headset with its new Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones. The Gear VR regularly sells for $99, but is compatible only with select Samsung smartphone models.

Google reportedly is working on at least two new VR platforms -- a smartphone-powered viewer that would be a notch above its Cardboard platform, as well as a self-contained VR headset.

In January, the Consumer Technology Association predicted  that interest in new VR products, such as the Oculus Rift, Gear VR and HTC Vive and coming Sony VR headset for the PS4, will cause unit sales to surge 500% in 2016 and reach 1.2 million units sold. CTA also expects VR to generate $540 million in revenues this year, up 440% from 2015.

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RELATED:'Virtual Reality -- Ready for a Closeup' Webinar, Feb. 24, with Andrew Trickett (Merge VR) and Tony Mugavero (Littlstar), moderated by Next TV editor Jeff Baumgartner

Initiatives from the likes of Facebook and YouTube are giving consumers an easy way to consume 360-degree video with no need for an additional headset.

However, the virtual-reality sector is already percolating with the full range of headsets — from entry-level, practically disposable platforms like Google Cardboard to new high-end platforms such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Here’s a snapshot of some VR headsets and viewers that are the market now, and some additional high-end platforms that will start shipping later this year. EDITOR's NOTE:Download the VR Headsets chart at the end of this article.

While some headsets appear to be going after a certain part of the market, “there’s room for multiple big winners that are that are going after different segments and use cases,” Andrew Trickett, co-founder of Merge Labs, said. “Our target is not so much the hard-core gamer as the … technology enthusiast.”

As for the Merge VR platform, it’s compatible with all of the Cardboard apps, though the company has also released a software |development kit to help partners build in capabilities that take advantage of its other functions, including lens adjustors and integrated buttons.

The company, which began to ship the Merge VR last November via outlets such as Amazon, has also developed Merge Start, a curated “trusted gateway” for VR apps and services. Early on, it features an “app of the day,” but will expand from there, Trickett said.

The VR market is expected to broaden in the year ahead. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that Google’s developing a successor to Cardboard that will feature a higher-quality headset and be more tightly integrated with the Android software and apps ecosystem.

Google is expected to announce details at its annual I/O developer’s conference in May.

Virtual reality and 360-degree video have become a growing priority for the pay TV industry, particularly among programmers, so I dipped my toe into the platform to see what all the fuss is about.

My first experience with VR was with Google Cardboard, a very inexpensive way to get a taste of the technology and some of the content that’s being developed. There are plenty of Cardboard apps available, and I found the whole apparatus easy and accessible, though the experience had that poor-man’s VR feel to it.

More recently, I’ve been kicking the tires on the Merge VR, a sturdier, foam-based and higher-end display that supports all of the Cardboard apps and some other features and functions — such as easily accessible control buttons — that aren’t present in Google’s entry-level set-up. It’s a nice step up, and certainly a big step up from Cardboard.

But late last year, I was gifted a Samsung Gear VR, the Oculus-powered mobile headset that works with select smartphones, including mine, the Galaxy S6 edge plus.

The Gear VR presents a far more immersive, tightly integrated experience, offering a 3D world and a small but growing walled garden of content, including games and an array of short videos and VR experiences from partners such as Discovery Channel and Syfy. The platform’s accurate head-tracking navigation is another plus.

However, the quality of the content is hit and miss. A zip through a desert in a Star Wars setting was a fuzzy, pixelated mess, but Titans of Space, a downloadable journey through the solar system and beyond, was a sharp and interesting visual delight. VR productions/clips of recent boxing matches from Showtime and Fox Sports gave me a ringside view of the fight game that I’ve never had before.

I also enjoyed GrooVR, a funky, thematic VR experience driven by the beats and tones of one’s own music; it went as far as allowing me to link the app to my Spotify account. A puzzle/adventure game called Land’s End was another visual pleasure.

But I also couldn’t tolerate staying in these environments for more than 30 minutes at a sitting, which fits in well with why the current video focus for VR is on shorter-form fare. I did enjoy experimenting with the Netflix VR app for Gear VR, but I’d be hard-pressed to watch an hour-long TV episode on it, let alone a two-hour movie.

User tolerance, though, is just part of what would prevent me from staying in the experience for much longer than 30 minutes. A big problem is that the smartphone that connects to and powers the Gear VR headset becomes a hot potato in 20 minutes or less. More than once, I saw this message: “Your Gear VR needs to cool down to maintain optimal performance.” 

Soon after that message appeared, the video from any game I was playing would stutter, sputter and flicker, and I’d have to set everything aside so it could cool down.

For what it does well and not so well, Gear VR could serve as a gateway to even higher-end platforms. I’m not ready to make the investment required for the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive (the Oculus Rift, for instance, starts at $599, but I’d also have to spring for a high-octane PC), but I will certainly be in the market for the PlayStation VR because it will work with a device I already own — the PlayStation 4.

Editor’s note:  For much more on the emerging market for virtual reality and 360 video, check out our special section on those topics in the February 15 edition of Multichannel News.  In addition to features on how programmers and studios are experimenting with this new medium and how VC dollars are pouring into the sector, we’ll also have a Q&A with Littlstar founder and CEO Tony Mugavero.

Aiming to bring virtual reality to the masses, OTT giant YouTube has launched two VR features to its Android app for smartphones that can be paired with inexpensive Google Cardboard viewers.

YouTube is attacking VR from two angles – new VR videos that provide full, 360-degree views (such as this six-minute video: The Hunger Games - Virtual Reality Experience ), and the conversion of existing, flatscreen YouTube videos that delivers a VR-like experience. For the latter, viewers must simply select a new “Cardboard” option from the watch page menu, and insert the smartphone into the viewer.

“All you need is your current phone, and a Google Cardboard viewer,” Kurt Wilms, senior product manager for YouTube VR noted in this blog post about the launch of the new features. “Both of today’s updates make it easier to be there.”

This video discusses the new VR video feature from YouTube in a bit more detail. 

Google and  YouTube aren’t the only companies looking to bring VR to the masses. Facebook is hoping to do the same via its Oculus division. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated that the company is bullish on VR’s future, but warned that consumer adoption of might not catch on like wildfire right away.

As the Twitterverse and tech blogs understandably poked all kinds of fun atTime’s virtual reality cover with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Comcast this week was also talking up its financial interest in VR as the emerging market starts to seek a mainstream audience. 

Gavin Teo, principal at Comcast Ventures, noted in this blog post that the VC recently participated in a $10.3 million funding round for AltSpaceVR (announced by the startup in July), joining a big group of return investors that include Tencent, Dolby Family Ventures and Promus Ventures, among others.

AltSpaceVR, which has raised $15.7 million and was founded in 2013, says its virtual reality communication software is currently available for Oculus users (for the full, immersive experience), or on Mac and PC desktops, and 3D TVs. The platform also supports a trio of input devices (mouse, Xbox 360 gamepad, or keyboard), and hand-and-body tracking systems such as Leap Motion and the Microsoft Kinect v2.

It will use the new f unds to expand its team and accelerate product development.

The product, in this case, enables users to communicate and share experiences in a 3D VR environment. “We are the only place to watch synchronized Netflix in VR with other people,” AltSpace VR proclaims in this video that shows its platform in action. “We are one of the few places where you can do a ‘Rick Roll’ in VR with other people.” Yes, indeed. Sharing is caring.

“One of the most compelling features is the ability to watch streaming video from services like YouTube, Netflix and Twitch in VR,” Teo wrote. “Imagine Game of Thrones streamed in a 2D web player in the shape of a TV screen hanging on the wall of a 3D space you are sharing with a friend on the other side of the world.”

While the VR market is predicted to explode, the question, Teo said, is what consumers will do when they put on VR head-mounted displays from Oculus, Vive, Sony, Samsung or even Google Cardboard

 “Our view is that they will consume different kinds of media: games, animation, cinematic storytelling, live action sports - and they will want to do it with their friends,” he wrote.