Current VR Hardware makes VR suck

Be warned, this will read as a rant post (because it is). I paid > $1,000 for the Oculus Quest Pro recently to test it out, only to return it in less than a week.

I want to love VR.

Every time I put on my Quest to play Beatsaber, I’m reminded of how immersive and amazing gaming can be in the future. FitXR makes me feel like I’m in an actual boxing class (if actual boxing classes had notes flying at you), and Superhot makes me feel like some CIA operative.

But all that said, I don’t love VR. As immersive as it feels in games like those, the hardware sucks. Even when you pay top dollar for the best of the best.

Putting on the headset feels like strapping a giant brick to your face. A brick that fights to have the battery life of a Nintendo Switch and render games that look like they’d run well on the iPhone 4 from back in 2010.

Just buy a [VR Headset that plugs into your PC]!

No.

Honestly, that’s almost worse.

Sure, you trade poor graphics and battery life for a more immersive experience. But you give up one key thing that makes virtual reality feel like reality: movement. Unless you have an insane room setup, you just tethered your experience to wherever your PC (or game console) sits.

Let’s talk about movement, actually.

Movement is the single biggest disappointment in VR right now. It doesn't matter how good of a game you made. The graphics could be 8k, running on a headset displaying 240hz with infinite battery life thanks to an onboard nuclear reactor…

it all falls apart as soon as you need to move more than an arm’s length away. Your immersion is broken. You need to use an absolutely terrible “Movement” system - like teleporting to a spot in front of you, gliding in a direction awkwardly, etc. Immediately makes the entire reality fall apart.

Why do Beatsaber, FitXR, Superhot, etc. do so well as VR games? They don’t require movement. The extent of your exploration in Beatsaber ends after you pick a song from a menu. Most people that play these games never experience the strangest aspect of VR that other games don’t suffer from.

Movement in most games is so bad that many games need sliders or settings to give you “blinders” while you’re turning/moving around because of how jarring it can be, which gives many people actual motion sickness from playing. There are band-aids and partial fixes to the underlying issue of movement just being bad.

There are companies out there trying to solve this problem. They’re trying to make movement better. 360 treadmills, special frictionless shoes with a ceiling tether, etc., but nobody will have stuff like that in their household.

I don’t know how to solve the movement issue, but I do know that there is no world where I will be excited about going on a virtual adventure when I’m teleporting every 20 ft to navigate the world.

Let’s talk about controls.

To Meta’s credit, the hand tracking on the quest series has actually gotten pretty good. Navigating menus, grabbing objects, and interacting with worlds without controllers feel pretty good and work decently well. That assumes, however, the games you’re playing support hand-based controls. (All 3 games I mentioned above don’t.)

The controllers for these things are complicated. They try to make it “natural” to do things (like grabbing, throwing, etc.), but they really feel strange. If you’ve come from playing games for years like me, you’ll get the hang of it.

But, try handing a VR headset to your mom with those controllers and no other info — you’ll see how “intuitive” they really are.

Despite all this, so many games and companies are developing AR/VR-first and exclusive experiences. Sinking a ton of funding into these projects with the hope that they’ll be the ones to take the throne of their category in this future digital landscape.

And maybe they will. But right now, the devices people need to get to those worlds are holding it back. High prices, terrible controls, immersion-breaking workarounds, and poor specs. Me, I’d make sure that if VR was such a target, I was also making sure the experience played and worked well on other platforms, too. (Did you know even games like VRChat don’t actually need to be played in VR?)

I think VR will have a place for everyone in the future, but it’s not here yet. Not by a long shot.