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VR and AR headsets · Meta Quest

Meta Quest Oculus

6owners with an opinion
50%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for build quality and value; criticized for reliability and ease of use.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
In general this all feels right, but I don' think that a lack of a grandiose vision is necessarily a problem for a company (Facebook's mission of 'make the world more open and connected' boiled down to 'senator - we sell ads'). Product design is about delivering things that people want. Observing trends and trying to get ahead of them somehow is a big part of what makes for a successful product. The bigger issue for Meta right now is that they are not as effective at this game as they used to be. To some extent this might be an issue of brand (the Facebook portal was a great product but nobody trusts the company). But based on my experiences with their products I feel like this gets things backwards. People don't like their brand because their products suck (Apple sucks up way more personal data, but thousands of Apple fans will crawl from the woodwork to defend them) If their core products were good experiences things would be different. The engineering talent at Facebook is truly top notch and while they are good on recruiting I think a lot of it comes from a culture of excellence on the technical side. But the product and UX directions of Meta feel off. Accounts alone has personally burned me. I have an Oculus quest that was effectively reset because of Meta's accounts transitions. My Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook accounts were all separate, and are all now partially merged but transition sucked for all of them with no benefit to me the user.
Doesn’t like it
I'm really just not convinced VR has much room to take off in the first place. The Oculus Quest is pretty great, hardware-wise. Even the OS isn't too bad - the problems arise when you try to find anything worth doing. Games are long and hard to get into, VR experiences are short and costly. I mostly just found myself using the Quest as a way to watch movies on an OLED screen. After a few weeks I just went back to watching TV the normal way and haven't found a reason to go back since. Superhot and Half Life: Alyx was fun, but VR isn't poised for success if it's just going to be another console arena.
Likes it
Same here except I have the Oculus Quest which I purchased for our family for Christmas. Just the Amazon Prime app and Netflix app were reason enough to buy it for the different viewing experience it provides during these times of spending so much time inside of the house. It really feels like getting out of the house when you watch an Amazon Prime show in a large theatre with a cinematic screen.
Likes it
I think you have it exactly backwards. VR might not catch on as readily among affluent folks who can afford to have all these great experiences in real life, but will be a great escape for others (yes, I'm aware some will see that as dystopian, but to me it's just a better TV). The Oculus Quest isn't like 5.1 sound at all. I kickstarted the original Oculus and would agree with your characterization there, but the Quest is entirely different. It's self contained, not needing to be tethered to a computer, and the boundary configuration is a snap. You do it from within the VR, observing your own room with its cameras, and just draw the boundary walls. Many games you can even do seated but "room scale" ones only need about 6ft x 6ft, which most people even in tiny apartments can put together.