The Meta Quest 3 may sell just two million units in the second half of 2023, far fewer than the Meta Quest 2, leading to lay-offs in the Reality Labs division.
Its a mixed bag. The Pico headsets are around the same price point but at that price point, you are typically paying with your user data as well. Its just a question of who you are giving it to facebook or some random ass Chinese company. While Facebook trying to own "VR" for itself is bad I will at least thank them for making headsets that make it more likely people are willing to dip their feet into VR. While facebook sucks, only having to pay 300 to 400 to get into something you may absolutely hate. They make for great "starter" headsets that you can probably easily find on the 2nd hand market for sub 200. Try out VR on a quest and if you like the concept and feelings of it probably invest more on a better headset. Hopefully we will hear more about Valve's Deckard soon.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention PSVR 2 which is pretty damn good but for 550, I don't think it will have a massive appeal to console games seeing as they are gaming on something funnily worth less than that headset. It being locked to only the PS5 is also a massive penalty against it and there is no news of a fan made driver for it on pc.
They're not just entry level headsets. You can link them to a powerful gaming computer through Steam Link and then they're the equivalent of a $1200 headset from Valve or HTC.
100% not equivalent. I said entry since it gets the job done but it has a ton of limitations. The biggest one is it having to compress the video via the link cable and it having to decode on its own cpu. So this can lead to a some artificating and some stuttering issues. This is a problem that can be solved if Meta chooses to use DP over usb via the displayport protocol but that makes engineering a bit harder and it runs counter to their whole point of the device being a standalone unit, this isn't even an unrealistic ask since this is how the PSVR2 works.
2nd one and this is only a partial issue but its still worth mentioning battery life. For many people having a link cable will extend the life of your quest 2 but it won't keep the same charge level so a session will probably stop after 2 or 3 hours. Which is fine for a single person but if you are doing this for a party or something, may not be enough time to let everyone have a go with the thing. So a standard headset will just have a dedicated power cable and can go for as long as you want it to. Like said I'm hesitant to put too much faith on meta since they can easily drop support for these headsets. To my knowledge the quest 1 still works with a link cable but how long do we expect that to be the case, maybe one day a software update with their oculus platform basically makes it impossible to use it.
If your computer has USB-C 3.2 v2 then you can play for infinite time over the charge cable. I have a couple on my MOBO and as soon as I switched to those ports I never had charging issues. I think that resolves the video compression issue too. I'm not certain about the video issue but the bandwidth of 3.2 v2 is double what the display port is. I've never had any issues anyway. I'm sure there are other benefits to the pricier headsets too, like not having to deal with Facebook, and possibly better interfaces and stuff, but for the money the Quest v2 is pretty awesome.
Its a mixed bag. The Pico headsets are around the same price point but at that price point, you are typically paying with your user data as well. Its just a question of who you are giving it to facebook or some random ass Chinese company. While Facebook trying to own "VR" for itself is bad I will at least thank them for making headsets that make it more likely people are willing to dip their feet into VR. While facebook sucks, only having to pay 300 to 400 to get into something you may absolutely hate. They make for great "starter" headsets that you can probably easily find on the 2nd hand market for sub 200. Try out VR on a quest and if you like the concept and feelings of it probably invest more on a better headset. Hopefully we will hear more about Valve's Deckard soon.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention PSVR 2 which is pretty damn good but for 550, I don't think it will have a massive appeal to console games seeing as they are gaming on something funnily worth less than that headset. It being locked to only the PS5 is also a massive penalty against it and there is no news of a fan made driver for it on pc.
They're not just entry level headsets. You can link them to a powerful gaming computer through Steam Link and then they're the equivalent of a $1200 headset from Valve or HTC.
100% not equivalent. I said entry since it gets the job done but it has a ton of limitations. The biggest one is it having to compress the video via the link cable and it having to decode on its own cpu. So this can lead to a some artificating and some stuttering issues. This is a problem that can be solved if Meta chooses to use DP over usb via the displayport protocol but that makes engineering a bit harder and it runs counter to their whole point of the device being a standalone unit, this isn't even an unrealistic ask since this is how the PSVR2 works.
2nd one and this is only a partial issue but its still worth mentioning battery life. For many people having a link cable will extend the life of your quest 2 but it won't keep the same charge level so a session will probably stop after 2 or 3 hours. Which is fine for a single person but if you are doing this for a party or something, may not be enough time to let everyone have a go with the thing. So a standard headset will just have a dedicated power cable and can go for as long as you want it to. Like said I'm hesitant to put too much faith on meta since they can easily drop support for these headsets. To my knowledge the quest 1 still works with a link cable but how long do we expect that to be the case, maybe one day a software update with their oculus platform basically makes it impossible to use it.
If your computer has USB-C 3.2 v2 then you can play for infinite time over the charge cable. I have a couple on my MOBO and as soon as I switched to those ports I never had charging issues. I think that resolves the video compression issue too. I'm not certain about the video issue but the bandwidth of 3.2 v2 is double what the display port is. I've never had any issues anyway. I'm sure there are other benefits to the pricier headsets too, like not having to deal with Facebook, and possibly better interfaces and stuff, but for the money the Quest v2 is pretty awesome.