VR Has Had A Phase Change And I Didn't Know It

To set expectations, this is not a sweeping review of the entire industry; indeed, quite the contrary. This is just one guy’s story about his limited experiences with VR gaming.

About five years ago, the office I work at allowed some interested employees to host a “VR Gaming” event in the main conference room. It wasn’t sponsored by the company, so it was put on just by the enthusiasts that happened to work there.

In one of our large conference rooms, they carted in about three setups.

One of them was moderately modern in that it didn’t require extensive play space delineation, but still had wires everywhere and was quite heavy.

One of them required four towers to delinate the play space, and multiple wires to the headset.

One of them I don’t even remember anything about except that they never got it working anyhow.

All of them required thousands of dollars of gear, and high end computers running at the edge of their capability, far more capable than anything I had at the time.

For this, they got:

• Visibly grainy environments.
• Fairly dim environments. I played Beat Saber which has a very Tron aethestic, where the “skybox” is just black, but against that is supposed to be a neon light aesthetic. But it was too dim to sell that aesthetic.
• Frame rates were just barely adequate, honestly.
• Everything just had the faint aura of jankiness in the tracking, even when it was nominally working.

The net of this was not to sell me on the experience, but quite the contrary. I wrote off VR at the time entirely.

And I never bothered to update my experience with it. I was not terribly interested anyhow.

With their Christmas money, my kids decided to buy a Meta Quest 3S.

The change is staggering.

The headset in VR mode is quite bright. Beat Saber, still one of the top-end must buys, is night-and-day different. I can still make out pixels… but just barely, and I have to try. It is easy to not notice. I’ve linked both mentions of Beat Saber to its release trailer from 2019… that is not what it looked like on contemporary hardware, but it looks like that now.

Tracking is spot on, with very low latency.

Frame rates are beyond anything I can discern, for native content.

The AR integration, even when you’re not really doing anything except passing through a view of the outside world so you can walk in it, is still noticably worse quality than a direct view on reality, but it’s enough to function with.

And the headset itself is doing the VR processing. We can and have hooked up our household gaming-class computer to it and it works, but the integrated internal processing is definitely a cut better in latency.

No towers or any other special game space preparation is required. The VR headset decides to set up gaming spaces, prompts you when it is necessary, and all you have to do is sort of look around you for 15-30 seconds, and it is done. There is only minimal improvement on this possible.

Letting others see what you’re doing is achieved via casting, which works well.

This is a huge amount of progress, and despite being a regular tech reader, I had no idea.

In the title, I call it a “phase change”. I chose to not say it has “arrived”. There are still some downsides:

1. A lot of good work in motion sickness and eye strain minimization has clearly been done, but it is still a problem. Just much less of one. But I don’t want to undersell this… the idea that you’d wear this continuously on a five hour flight is still not practical in my experience.
2. Gaming selection is still quite weak, though for $300 rather than $thousands it is less of a problem. If you already have a gaming PC that you can use to augment this purchase I’d still recommend it.
3. Battery life is terrible. We’ve been plugging in a battery pack during extended gaming sessions. The one we’ve been using actually still can’t keep up with the discharge but limits it to maybe a percent every couple of minutes lost instead of nearly a “watch the fuel guage drop” experience.
4. The headset can still be awkward. Rapidly changing between family members is a bit rough.

But for $300, it’s amazing progress. For $400 you can have the headset and pretty much all the good games, which is both sorta neat, but also a reflection of my point about gaming selection.

It has not “arrived”. But without me noticing it, it progressed from “hobbyiest” to viable niche. And that is absolutely enormous.

The family Beat Saber competition is already heating up, and heck, the whole setup is getting to the order of price on going out to an arcade experience once or twice, rather than “the next three year’s budget for computer hardware”.