I’ve gone from slightly skeptical about modern VR to a full enthusiast convert in the space of 30 days thanks to the awesome time I’ve had with the Quest 2.
When I was a kid, I was filled with hope about the possibilities of virtual reality after trying the hilarious Dactyl Nightmare, and reading about Sega’s never-released VR headset in gaming magazines. But then true physical reality sunk in. Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was a mess, consigned to bargain bins before it got any momentum. Early commercial VR had some success in arcade settings, but it required too much expensive hardware to ever truly come home.
That started to change around a decade ago with the progress made by Oculus. They developed cheaper head tracking and display systems that could work well enough with gaming PCs. They got bought by Facebook, and have now ballooned into the largest of the VR gaming ecosystems, selling over 20 million Quest 2’s in short order and launching the cutting edge Quest 3 just a few months ago. They’ve taken some losses on R and D and they’ve been experimenting with ways to improve user retention, including offering a new subscription game catalog similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass — a service which is itself now accessible on their headsets on top of that.
VR got a big public awareness boost last month thanks to the launch of the Apple Vision…
