BARCELONA—Virtual reality is a big deal at Mobile World Congress this year. HTC and Valve have the Vive. LG was showing off its version of Google Cardboard. And now Samsung has a version of its Gear VR Innovator Edition for its new Galaxy S 6 and Galaxy S 6 edge phones, which I strapped on yesterday.

The new Gear VR has a few changes from the existing model. It's still a headset that straps over your whole head, with a touchpad on the side. It doesn't have the plastic part that snaps over the back of the phone; you can see the Galaxy S 6 when it's in the Gear VR. Samsung says it's 15 percent lighter, but it still has so many straps, pads, and parts that it still feels like a real production to put on and wear. (It's probably less of a production than the Vive, though, judging from HTC's photos.)

The new unit does still have the VR's magic trick, which is the pair of magnifying lenses that let an image which only takes up a small part of the phone's screen, expand across your whole field of vision. That's the VR's main advantage over Google Cardboard: because it's rendering smaller images, those images can be much smoother. Swiveling my head in the Gear VR, things looked a bit pixelated, but the motion was smooth and immersive. As the S 6 has an 11 percent denser screen than the Galaxy Note 4, which worked with the original Gear VR, there was a bit less pixelation - but there was still pixelation.

I wear glasses, and since glasses don't fit in the headset, I had to turn the Gear VR's focus wheel all the way to its shortest setting to work. My glasses aren't all that strong; I can't imagine that someone who's really myopic would be able to use this headset. That's one of the big minuses I've found with both this and the Oculus Rift.

Samsung didn't give a price or release date, but I'd anticipate that this will cost the same $199 as the existing unit, and it'll come out in April like the Galaxy S 6. Obviously, the Gear VR's experience is leagues ahead of any Google Cardboard-style view. The real question is how this headset will compare to HTC's Vive. We'll see that later in the show at Mobile World Congress.

For more, see PCMag's Hands On With the Samsung Galaxy S 6 (video below) and our first look at the original Samsung Gear VR Headset (slideshow above).