Yeah, that’s it. It wasn’t having your fascist, boot-licking CEO show up wearing the stupidest looking shades that made investors cringe and look for the door. Cause we all know Zuck looks cool and people want to emulate him, right? He’s not a jackass in a curly mop.
Maybe next they should have Elon wear them. We can just go down the line having stupid-looking billionaires take turns modeling these things and suck the whole industry dry of any investor money by mid-year. Who should go third? Oh, I know! Sam Altman with his two popped collars. I can’t wait. What a trio of clowns. And that’s just who I thought of off the top of my head.
I’ve always been mildly interested in VR, but never wanted to invest in a data collector from Facebook. Maybe Valve can make me buy one of these.
You can find an older wired VR headset for cheap in the used market. Or even a Q2 if you are feeling fancier. Apart from lenses and resolution they are functionally identical to newer ones.
My first game was Superhot VR and I instantly fell in love.
Steam Frame
choo choo
I remember being excited for the Oculus Rift. Then Facebook bought it and my interest went to zero. Even now, whenever someone talks about different VR headests, everyone puts ‘Facebook’ in the negative column if it is from them.
I’m pretty excited about the new Steam VR heasdest that is fully self-contained, though. :)
I view VR adoption the same as IoT and smart home adoption; the greed and narcissism of capitalism killed the markets before they could even be established.
Just like I will never buy a monitor or TV locked to a specific corporation, I will never buy a VR headset that is not interoperable with any computer; especially one that requires an account, data harvesting or internet connection to operate.
Home Assistant is great for offline home automation and it’s open source!
Yes but you must buy stuff that is compatible with it, or use DNS tricks to make the stuff you have not phone home… It’s doable but definitely not painless. Also you must maintain your lights, on top of everything else…
Gods no. I’d be happy to see Facebook out of the VR market. I’ve high hopes for Valve’s new headset.
I’m concerned that Valve doesn’t really seem to be in it for VR, more of a “sit on your ass and play flat games on a virtual screen” thing. Maybe that’s the best way to get VR headsets in an average gamer’s home?
I could see barely-VR ports like NMS more common going forward, with fewer games made for VR specifically.
Also worth noting that meta funded a lot of studios even beyond their first party stuff. IIRC that includes games like Behemoth or Metro Awakening. That money drying up will definitely mean less VR games in total.
Maybe someday I’ll actually be able to play RE4 VR.
Is this a link to digg? lol
Here is the og article: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/24/metas-reality-labs-cuts-sparked-fears-of-a-vr-winter.html
Remember Digg? It’s back, in POG form!
Remember Alf Bart?
Getting Meta’s walled garden fingers out of the VR pie can only be a good thing, perhaps long term, but given Steam Frame incoming, probably not.
I don’t want to see VR fail, but I do want to see Meta fail.
side note: saw my guest meta glasses yesterday, I didn’t like being recorded in that way.
Well VRChat and their audience isn’t going anywhere, that’s for sure.
By a significant margin when compared to any other of the big-tech companies, buying hardware from Facebook seems like an unfathomably stupid idea.
And this is not me saying hardware from any of the rest of them is a good idea.
I just am not sold that there’s enough of a market, not with the current games and current prices.
There are several different types of HMDs out there. I haven’t seen anyone really break them up into classes, but if I were to take a stab at it:
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VR gaming googles. These focus on providing an expansive image that fills the peripheral vision, and cut one off from the world. The Valve Index would be an example.
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AR goggles. I personally don’t like the term. It’s not that augmented reality isn’t a real thing, but that we don’t really have the software out there to do AR things, and so while theoretically these could be used for augmented reality, that’s not their actual, 2026 use case. But, since the industry uses it, I will. These tend to display an image covering part of one’s visual field which one can see around and maybe through. Xreal’s offerings are an example.
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HUD glasses. These have a much more limited display, or maybe none at all. These are aimed at letting one record what one is looking at less-obtrusively, maybe throw up notifications from a phone silently, things like the Ray-Ban Meta.
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Movie-viewers. These things are designed around isolation, but don’t need head-tracking. They may be fine with relatively-low resolution or sharpness. A Royole Moon, for example.
For me, the most-exciting prospect for HMDs is the idea of a monitor replacement. That is, I’d be most-interested in something that does basically what my existing displays do, but in a lower-power, more-portable, more-private form. If it can also do VR, that’d be frosting on the cake, but I’m really principally interested in something that can be a traditional monitor, but better.
For me, at least, none of the use cases for the above classes of HMDs are super-compelling.
For movie-viewing. It just isn’t that often that I feel that I need more isolation than I can already get to watch movies. A computer monitor in a dark room is just fine. I can also put things on a TV screen or a projector that I already have sitting around and I generally don’t bother to turn on. If I want to block out outside sound more, I might put on headphones, but I just don’t need more than that. Maybe for someone who is required to be in noisy, bright environments or something, but it just isn’t a real need for me.
For HUD glasses, I don’t really have a need for more notifications in my field of vision — I don’t need to give my phone a HUD.
AR could be interesting if the augmented reality software library actually existed, but in 2026, it really doesn’t. Today, AR glasses are mostly used, as best I can tell, as an attempt at a monitor replacement, but the angular pixel density on them is poor compared to conventional displays. Like, in terms of the actual data that I can shove into my eyeballs in the center of my visual field, which is what matters for things like text, I’m better off with conventional monitors in 2026.
VR gaming could be interesting, but the benefits just aren’t that massive for the games that I play. You get a wider field of view than a traditional display offers, the ability to use your head as an input for camera control. There are some genres that I think that it works well with today, like flight sims. If you were a really serious flight-simmer, I could see it making sense. But most genres just don’t benefit that much from it. Yeah, okay, you can play Tetris Effect: Connected in VR, but it doesn’t really change the game all that much.
A lot of the VR-enabled titles out there are not (understandably, given the size of the market) really principally aimed at taking advantage of the goggles. You’re basically getting a port of a game aimed at probably a keyboard and mouse, with some tradeoffs.
And for VR, one has to deal with more setup time, software and hardware issues, and the cost. I’m not terribly price sensitive on gaming compared to most, but if I’m getting a peripheral for, oh, say, $1k, I have to ask how seriously I’m going to play any of the games that I’m buying this hardware for. I have a HOTAS system with flight pedals; it mostly just gathers dust, because I don’t play many WW2 flight sims these days, and the flight sims out there today are mostly designed around thumbsticks. I don’t need to accumulate more dust-collectors like that. And with VR the hardware ages out pretty quickly. I can buy a conventional monitor today and it’ll still be more-or-less competitive for most uses probably ten or twenty years down the line. VR goggles? Not so much.
At least for me, the main things that I think that I’d actually get some good out of VR goggles on:
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Vertical-orientation games. My current monitors are landscape aspect ratio, and don’t support rotating (though I imagine that there might be someone that makes a rotating VESA mount pivot, and I could probably use
wlr-randrto make Wayland change the display orientation manually) Some games in the past in arcades had something like a 3:4 portrait mode aspect ratio. If you’re playing one of those, you could maybe get some extra vertical space. But unless I need the resolution or portability, I can likely achieve something like that by just moving my monitor closer while playing such a game. -
Pinball sims, for the same reason.
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There are a couple of VR-only games that I’d probably like to play (none very new).
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Flight sims. I’m not really a super-hardcore flight simmer. But, sure, for WW2 flight sims or something like Elite: Dangerous, it’s probably nice.
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I’d get a little more immersiveness out of some games that are VR-optional.
But…that’s just not that overwhelming a set of benefits to me.
Now, I am not everyone. Maybe other people value other things. And I do think that it’s possible to have a “killer app” for VR, some new game that really takes advantage of VR and is so utterly compelling that people feel that they’d just have to get VR goggles so as to not miss out. Something like what World of Warcraft did for MMO gaming, say. But the VR gaming effort has been going on for something like a decade now, and nothing like that has really turned up.
Sounds like you need to play games like Half-Life Alyx, Pavlov VR, and Into the Radius, which are designed around VR movement and hand manipulation that truly cannot be given justice on a flat display with a controller or a mouse and keyboard setup. A used Index is quite cheap these days, or you could wait for the Frame.
There are even non-meta wild card headsets like Bigscreen beyond, PSVR2 (PC compatible now), and Vive’s standalone line.
To me, the killer app of VR is the moment when your brain clicks over from ‘I see this room in my headset’ to ‘I’m standing in a room’, this is often called Presence.
There are a lot of things in the way of that: low resolution displays, low frame rate due to the large total resolution and poor/delayed tracking, lens type/orientation creating first and second order reflections etc. All of these are slowly improving and the solutions are becoming cheaper.
And you’re right that the software needs to catch up, that’s the chicken and egg problem. Nobody wants to develop games for VR because there is no customer base and nobody wants to spend a ton of money on VR when there are few games worth playing.
Flight sims. I’m not really a super-hardcore flight simmer. But, sure, for WW2 flight sims or something like Elite: Dangerous, it’s probably nice.
The other good thing about them is that if you’re sitting in a chair then you’re getting a lot of tactile feedback that matches your in-game perspective.
I am not a super-hardcore flight simmer but VTOL VR is probably the VR game that I have the most hours in. It’s a one man project but he does a great job of creating in-sim controls for the aircraft. You don’t (can’t?) use anything but the VR controls, grab a flight stick, press a button, tap a screen, etc. It has enough depth to the planes and systems that it feels real-ish, without requiring a multi-week training course (DCS A-10C, smh).
Another title focusing on in-sim controls is Iron Rebellion. Same idea, you’re sitting in a cockpit, a mech this time, and there are variety of in-sim controls and gauges in place of UI and hardware controls.
There are some enjoyable games, but you’re right that the price:good game ratio isn’t great, but the tech keeps getting better and the library of games is slowly growing. I think we’ll eventually reach a tipping point where all it takes is one good VR-exclusive game to drive people to the platform.
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I was commenting a year or so back on the decline of the titles-released-per-year of VR titles on Steam.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=21978
That’s been going on for some time, not looking really healthy.
That’s largely a result of facebook buying up a bunch of vr dev companies and making them release quest exclusives. I’d be curious to see what titles released oer year looks like if you include all platforms.
Yeah I had the same thought.
