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VR and AR headsets · Meta Quest

Meta Quest 1

12owners with an opinion
75%of verdicts positive
8/3positive/negative since 2024
5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for support and display.

What owners wrote

Recommends itOwned 5 yearsStill going
I'm quite a big fan of my Quest 1 as a cheap flight sim headset, too. I don't end up using it more than maybe twice a week, but that's more than worth-it for the $400 I paid 5 years ago. It installs (or "sideloads" in present vernacular) Android apps like any other device, browses the web, and streams wireless VR from my desktop via ALVR when I want to play games. It does a lot of stuff you wouldn't expect out of a "depreciated" piece of hardware. The trepidation behind VR for professional applications makes sense to me - it's expensive and tough to compare with what it's replacing. As a pure vehicle for fun though, I genuinely have no regrets with my Quest hardware. It was easily a better purchase than my Xbox One.
Doesn’t like it
Exactly where I am. Was all-in on Quest 1 and Quest 2, but had to offboard due to Meta's wild policies (that ended up locking me out of my account with little recourse -- some bug with the Oculus standalone account merge with FB and then re-split). As much as I'm a proponent of VR, I won't play by Meta's rules.
Likes it
Quest 1, the built in native streaming, with a wired connection from the beefy desktop to a WiFi 5 AP on 5 GHz in a low noise environment worked sufficiently. I'd get at least a Quest 2 if you're getting something new (not sure if the 3 is better than the 2).
Doesn’t like it
I’m on my third quest unit (my quest 1 died during the pandemic and I had to buy a new 1, and then the 2 came out). I still use it for around 3-4 hours a week and I’m thinking about upgrading to the quest 3. Just use one or two apps though (beat saber and fitxr), I never really got into actual gaming or social stuff on it. I wish a company would come around and seethe potential for fitness tech with VR, they could come up with better optimized solutions for it (and I don’t really count the mirror or stationary bike stuff). Fitness really fees like the killer app.
Likes it
Why would I want to go the route of having to plug in the controllers and not be able to use them while I charge them versus just swapping in a set of spare, charged batteries? Rechargeable AAs have been around for decades! It's the same setup my quest 1 and 2 have, and it has never failed me, I got 4 batteries total, 2 in the charger, 2 in the headset, I swap them around when they eventually (after a looooong time) run out.
Likes it
Weird. Maybe I've always been given a Quest that was already setup or rooted. I've never bought one myself. I only ran into this issue recently with a Quest 3. Every Quest 1 and 2 I've used I could enable developer mode and do what I wanted. adb just worked after enabling developer mode.
Likes it
The killer app for these cheap headsets is streaming software, like ALVR or Virtual Desktop. I've been playing No Mans Sky and VTOL VR (with Proton!!!) and streamed to my headset with surprising stability and little latency. The standard native Quest games are okay, but my OG Quest 1 really shines when you use it to play wireless PCVR streamed over Wifi. I would not be surprised if this was the main use-case for these headsets nowadays.
Likes it
> …I guess I’ve been an enthusiast since the Rift Kickstarter? The rift CV1 was really comfortable because there wasn't a whole lot in it. No processing, no battery, no cameras. It was pretty light. And the strap was not built down to a price and skimped on to upsell the elite straps. Even the much heavier quest 1 was way more comfortable than the quest 2 and 3. Way better standard strap. So good an elite one wasn't even needed.
Likes it
People like to say this but my friend just sent me a recording of “drop dead home invasion” with the Quest 3 and my jaw was on the floor. He says it’s amazing too. I’ve also heard about players spending a lot of time in counter strike games like pavlov. At this point it seems like there’s a TON of things to do in VR (and I’m gonna be honest, there were a ton of experiences too on the Quest 1 when I had it). I’m just waiting for more live shows and concerts that I can attend from the Quest personally.
Doesn’t like it
I had Rift, Quest 1, and Quest 2. The problem with these is 1. They’re really high friction to turn on so I don’t usually bother 2. The displays are too low rez so I don’t want to read text/do work or watch non-3D movies in them (though 3D ones are spectacular, but too hard to set up and no streaming service support means even more friction “acquiring” them), and 3. There aren’t enough AAA blockbuster narrative games (Half Life Alyx made my entire Rift purchase worth it, but nothing single handedly justified the Quest 2). The UI is also really annoying to navigate without controllers. Idk why they didn’t instantly adopt the Apple look-and-pinch model (even without eye tracking a crosshair with snapping would probably be fine).
Likes it
I own a Quest 1, and I've got every bone to pick with Facebook imaginable. However, the Oculus Passthrough implementation (and their 'guardian' feature, for that matter) is unparalleled. It's many times more dependable than the SteamVR safety features, and surprisingly low-latency. I'm not at all surprised that it's local.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
I don't know if you'll ever see this, but thought I'd reply. First, the original Rift headsets were as you describe: lightweight, passing through the PC VR image. However, Meta did not miss out on an opportunity. In what was perhaps the most effective A/B test they could run, they released the Rift S (tethered PCVR) and Quest 1 at effectively the same time. The market feedback was resounding: I believe it was a 10-to-1 preference for a standalone experience vs. tied to a PC. Since they doubled down on standalone (or all-in-one if you prefer), well over 20 million headsets have been sold. In fact, they're so popular that even the fraction that connects to Steam is basically tied for market share with the most popular PC VR headset ever, the Index. Second, even as a PC VR HMD it was a real stretch to call it a monitor equivalent. It's wildly complicated to create compelling VR images. You need two screens at nearly 2Kx2K resolution each, running at 90 frames/second, sustained. Dip below that and you can induce nausea. Not every PC can do that, so you need careful engineering between the client and HMD, with tricks like time warp, space warp, interleaving, compression, prediction, pose estimation, etc. to take up the slack. Creating sub-millimeter precision of location with six degrees of freedom either requires external base stations (cost, complexity) or inside-out tracking with headset-mounted cameras and a processor running realtime simultaneous location and mapping and imag…