EmmaStone
Member
Every year or so I try this again, and What Hi-Fi running a VR home cinema piece for their Home Cinema Week pushed me into another go. Their writer ran the same experiment on a Quest 2 and came away positive about the flexibility, which matches my experience right up to the point where I want to sit through something for two hours.
The hardware is genuinely better than it was. Quest 3 at 600 dollars with 2064 x 2208 per eye, the 3S at 350, Pico 4 Ultra at around 710 with 2160 x 2160, PSVR2 at 399 with an HDR OLED panel at 2000 x 2040 per panel, and the Vision Pro at 3699 with dual micro-OLED 4K displays. Those counts read like a spec sheet that should have settled this by now.
It has not, because the number that matters is not pixels per eye, it is how far those pixels are stretched across the field of view. A virtual hundred inch screen in a headset is not the same thing as a hundred inch screen on your wall, and the moment you hit fine detail or a wide grainy shot you notice the softness towards the lens edges. Contrast is the part VR quietly does well, especially on the OLED based headsets, because there is no room light at all to fight.
Where it wins for me is the case nobody mentions in these articles: watching something when the room is not yours to control. Hotel, spare room, someone asleep next door. As a replacement for a real setup it is not close.
Has anyone here finished a long film in a headset without pulling it off halfway? Which one, and how heavy was the thing by the end?
The hardware is genuinely better than it was. Quest 3 at 600 dollars with 2064 x 2208 per eye, the 3S at 350, Pico 4 Ultra at around 710 with 2160 x 2160, PSVR2 at 399 with an HDR OLED panel at 2000 x 2040 per panel, and the Vision Pro at 3699 with dual micro-OLED 4K displays. Those counts read like a spec sheet that should have settled this by now.
It has not, because the number that matters is not pixels per eye, it is how far those pixels are stretched across the field of view. A virtual hundred inch screen in a headset is not the same thing as a hundred inch screen on your wall, and the moment you hit fine detail or a wide grainy shot you notice the softness towards the lens edges. Contrast is the part VR quietly does well, especially on the OLED based headsets, because there is no room light at all to fight.
Where it wins for me is the case nobody mentions in these articles: watching something when the room is not yours to control. Hotel, spare room, someone asleep next door. As a replacement for a real setup it is not close.
Has anyone here finished a long film in a headset without pulling it off halfway? Which one, and how heavy was the thing by the end?
