As a new thing for this new blog, here’s what I decided to do: Take a look at the VR options nowadays and how they are right now, rather than decide that the future should take precedence. What would be your experience right now if you should decide to engage with VR?
Meta, aka Facebook (which is what we should call it anyways) has a few products around. The Oculus Quest 2, the Meta Quest Pro and the Meta Quest 3. Neither of these are the definitive version of the product as a whole. The Quest 2 is too weak (nowadays that is). The Quest Pro is way too expensive. The Quest 3 is good and has somewhat of a good price but lacks many features from the Pro. Neither of them allow you to have the fingers to be tracked individually. Buying them can be easy if you live in the North American countries and Europe, but anything that isn’t those is a hassle, as Facebook doesn’t sell them officially.
The company put billions into designing the products and making things exclusive to their store. No one cared, and most importantly, only a few bought it. They tried to get their metaverse (ugh) up and running. None of their devs wanted to work on it because it sucked. Facebook didn’t build an ecosystem for people to get into, they just bullied everyone by buying a lot of companies and making stuff exclusive to their store, which didn’t seem to work. At best, you could use it to connect to a PC and enjoy games on SteamVR instead. Speaking of Steam VR…
Valve
Valve still sells the Valve Index, which is still the best VR headset you can buy right now. It’s not cheap but it’s still very good. I’ve heard that build quality can actually vary but I guess that’s expected?
A big win for Valve in this case is SteamVR. It’s compatible with plenty of devices, and even allows you to mix stuff. You can use the Index Controllers with a Meta Quest Pro and both will work without any issues. Pretty good stuff.
Half-Life: Alyx remains one of the best VR games, and can be played in any VR headset (which is incredible), however I don’t have much more to talk about Valve in this space, because the Index is pretty old at this point, and they seemed to pivot slightly to making consoles (actually handheld gaming PCs but you get the point). Time and time again there’s some rumors of a Index Lite (or whatever will be the name) being made to compete against the Quest 3. I think that Valve should try to make something closer to the Quest Pro instead and drop the price of the Index to make it compete against the Quest 3 instead.
Windows Mixed Reality
As per Liliputing, “companies including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung all launched Windows Mixed Reality headsets in 2017 or 2018, but we haven’t seen any significant new models in this space since 2020 and Microsoft hasn’t put much effort into Windows Mixed reality in recent years.”
It seemed that MS was gonna get into this market by doing the MS thing: Telling people they’ll support the hardware with their own software. But just like anything else that Microsoft does, it was bound to die off eventually.
UploadVRhas a page saying what’s gonna happen with these devices: “After 1 November 2026, you’ll no longer be able to download the software required to use Windows MR headsets, nor the SteamVR driver, so if you have the late 2024 Windows 11 update or newer you won’t be able to set up the headset.”
Well, that’s a bummer. But look at the upside: If you save 1 USD every day until November 1st 2026, you’ll have enough money to get a Quest 3.
Chinese Brands
There’s some other brands that make headsets, one of them is Pico, and they have been doing it for a few years. I can’t say much about the build quality myself, but they have been selling these for a few years, so I guess they are fine?
Apple Vision Pro
Buying an Vision Pro makes you look like a rich idiot. While not a bad product technology wise, it’s not really VR, more like AR (augmented reality) and because of that, you can’t really say it’s related to VR. And because it’s Apple, you can’t use it on a PC, only in a Mac, which isn’t the best way to play games, assuming that’s even what you wanna do with it. Plus, it’s way too expensive for what it is.
According to many websites, adoption rate is very low. The list of supported apps is also low (compared to iPhone and iPad apps), and Apple cut their forecast to sell 350,000 units. IDC informs that there’s less than 100,000 units sold in its first quarter, which is abysmal.
They recently launched in other markets, like China, but its adoption is simply not happening because it’s just too expensive.
“What should I get?”
If I can be honest, none of these. The technology is proven to be niche at best and headache-inducing at worst, which isn’t a positive.
Although I like it personally, I still think that prices need to drop immediately for a proper mass adoption, but even then, it might not be for everyone, as it can cause headaches for the first few times. A new phone won’t cause headaches but a new Quest 3 can. Kind of a hard sell, ain’t it?