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What hardware should I get?

Welcome to Virtual Reality! There are a lot of available VR headsets to pick from to jump into / upgrade your VR experience. This is a non-exhaustive list explaining what headsets would be good for what usecase.

 

Before choosing a headset, its important to consider what is important for you:

  • How much money are you willing to spend? Are you comfortable buying used products?
  • Are you new to VR? How much custom work are you willing to do to get experiences to work, or do you want something that works out of the box?
  • Do you want to prioritize comfort over feature set?
  • Do you sleep in VR?
  • Do you wear VR headsets for long hours?
  • Do you have a gaming computer?
  • Do you want to do work in your headset?
  • Are you playing racing sims? Motion intensive games? Shooters? Social VR?

 

Big Screen Beyond

For comfort customized for you, straight forward steamVR compatibility, and great mic quality. This headset is not for people new to VR but rather built for VR enthusiasts who want a comfy headset for spending thousands of hours in (or to sleep in).

- Small, light and comfortable
- 3D printed custom interface for your face specifically
- Relatively high resolution, microOled means excellent color contrast
- Very good microphone (some users even use this headset mic as a desktop mic as well)

- Expensive
- Notable glare issues in very dark scenes
- No speakers are included
- Fixed IPD significantly lowers resell value
- Face scan required using an iphone (you can borrow one as they use a webpage) to purchase
- Needs a relatively beefy PC to push at its full resolution

Quest 1

Severely outdated, which also means it can be found used for very cheap (aim for about 50-100 USD). Too old to run even most stand alone applications, but still capable of functional PC VR streaming.

- Cheap.
- Oled screen has great colors
- Can still do PCVR streaming

- Old, OS updates haven't come in years. Most stand alone software for meta will not run
- low resolution, fresnel lenses. Not particularly comfortable with its default strap

Quest 2

 

Quest 3

 

Quest 3s

 

Quest Pro

 

Valve Index

 

 

Vive (2016)

 

 

 

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