VR Headset Reviews | The Verge

Apple’s Vision Pro with M5 is better than the first, but still awfully lonely

2025-10-28T11:06:23-04:00

The new Vision Pro with M5 offers some improvements over the original.

Apple's Vision Pro remains the best VR headset by a mile, and there are many moments when it feels magical to use. I love staring at 3D photos, watching movies on huge screens, and working across a bunch of floating windows. But I noticed something weird after I wrote my first review in 2024: I took the headset off, put it back in its box, and didn't put it back on again.

The new M5 model remains a very good headset, now slightly faster and more comfortable than its predecessor. But I've still found it hard to return to instead of just watching a movie on my iPhone or TV, or working right from my Mac. It requires putting something on my hea …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not

2025-01-28T10:10:58-05:00

There's a lot of pressure on the new Apple Vision Pro, Apple's long-awaited entry into the world of computers you wear on your face. Apple claims that the Vision Pro, which starts at $3,499, is the beginning of something called "spatial computing," which basically boils down to running apps all around you. And the company's ads for it do not hedge that pressure even a little: they show people wearing the Vision Pro all the time. At work! Doing laundry! Playing with their kids! The ambition is enormous: to layer apps and information over the real world - to augment reality.

Apple has to claim that the Vision Pro is the beginning of something …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple Vision Pro hands-on, again, for the first time

2024-01-16T13:00:00-05:00

It’s impossible to look cool in a VR headset, even if it’s the $3,499 Vision Pro. | Image: Apple

It's a slushy, snowy day in New York City - the kind where I'd normally look out the window and declare a work-from-home day. But today, I hauled myself out into the wet cold because Apple had offered Nilay Patel and me demo time with the Apple Vision Pro.

Nilay and a few others have already spent time with the Vision Pro, but for everyone else, the $3,499 Vision Pro has been shrouded in mystery. But my half-hour with it revealed that Apple's headset felt more familiar than I thought it would. The iPhone face scan to select the correct light seal is very similar to setting up Face ID. Slipping it onto your head isn't that different from any …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta Quest 3 review: almost the one we’ve been waiting for

2023-10-09T11:00:00-04:00

The Quest 3 is an upgrade on the Quest 2 in most ways — but it’s still a Quest.

The Meta Quest 3 is much better than the Quest 2. It's more comfortable, more powerful, easier to figure out, more pleasant to use for long stretches, and just flat-out better. If that's all you've been wondering about Meta's latest headset, there's your answer. The passthrough improvements alone - the fact that I can now easily find my coffee / safely walk around the room without taking my headset off - makes this a worthwhile upgrade, even if you picked up a Quest 2 just a couple years ago and perhaps haven't used it as much as you thought you might.

But that's about the only thing I can say with total confidence about the Quest 3. Becaus …

Read the full story at The Verge.

PSVR 2 review: love on a leash

2025-01-28T10:30:29-05:00

Sony's first virtual reality headset, the 2016 PlayStation VR, wasn't exactly state-of-the-art. Engineers had to retrofit the PlayStation 4 with a converter box to send its graphics to a 1080p smartphone panel, topped with magnifying lenses, to create a fragile illusion of VR. Most games expected you to sit down with a traditional gamepad. If you wanted to reach out and touch, you had to shell out extra for a pair of last-gen PlayStation Move wands - ones that were already six years old when the headset first came out and barely did the job.

The new PlayStation VR2, launching February 22nd for $549, changes all of that.

The full PSVR 2 kit: two controllers and a headset. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge" data-portal-copyright="Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge">

Sony designed the e …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here

2025-01-28T10:30:33-05:00

Mark Zuckerberg is betting the entire future of his company on the metaverse. He renamed Facebook to Meta last year, and so far this year, he's spent $10 billion on Reality Labs, Meta's AR and VR development group. Reality Labs was not cut particularly hard in Meta's huge layoffs this week, even in the face of pressure to reduce the investment and focus on the core advertising business.

So the Quest Pro, Meta's new virtual reality headset, is facing a lot of pressure. It has to start delivering on a huge set of promises about the future of work - it's meant to host meetings, replace big monitors, and create a more lasting sense of connectio …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nreal Light review: Hardware is only half the battle

2021-11-22T09:41:58-05:00

Nreal has sold me on the appeal of watching TV with a pair of glasses, and I wish I could recommend buying the glasses that did it.

Nreal's Light sunglasses, which Verizon will start selling later this month, are one of only a few consumer-focused augmented reality headsets. They're an impressive technical feat: small for an AR or VR product, comparatively affordable at $599, and capable of full-fledged mixed reality that projects images into real space, not just a flat heads-up overlay like the North Focals.

Unfortunately, Nreal's software doesn't fulfill its hardware's promise. The Light is hampered by a bare-bones control scheme, a patc …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Oculus Quest 2 review: better, cheaper VR

2020-09-16T13:30:00-04:00

As someone who writes about virtual reality and has been stuck at home just like many people during the 2020 pandemic, I've gotten asked one question over and over: if virtual reality is so great and actual reality is so dangerous, why isn't everybody turning to VR? This isn't a totally fair framing, since VR usage has spiked by some measures. But it did expose a simple problem: I really couldn't recommend a headset that was friendly enough for most people to buy.

I've spent the last couple of weeks with Oculus' new Quest 2 headset, though, and that's very close to changing. The Quest 2 is a self-contained headset that's shipping on October …

Read the full story at The Verge.

One year on, the Oculus Quest is the VR headset to get

2020-05-21T12:09:17-04:00

One year ago today, Facebook released the Oculus Quest, its first headset to deliver a credible standalone VR experience - true head tracking, good motion controllers, and so on. It also marked a split in the Oculus ecosystem: the Quest had its own store, curated with games that had been tailored specifically for the headset's low-powered mobile hardware.

At the time, that made it somewhat of a limited product. "As an Oculus Rift owner, I'm deeply tempted by the Quest," Adi Robertson wrote in our review. "I'd love having a self-contained headset with all of the Rift's core features and none of its wires. I just wish I didn't have to pick b …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Vive Cosmos review: not out of this world

2019-10-10T12:33:40-04:00

HTC's Vive headset helped create virtual reality as we know it today. The Vive was the first big consumer headset to ship with motion controllers, and it normalized the idea that VR was about physical movement, not just visual immersion. Now, three years after the Vive's release, HTC is ready to move on. It's replacing the consumer Vive with a headset called the Vive Cosmos, which started shipping last week. Where the original Vive was a groundbreaking product, though, the Cosmos is playing catch-up in a crowded field.

The $699 Vive Cosmos is a high-end, PC-powered VR headset. (HTC originally said it might eventually be powered by a phone. …

Read the full story at The Verge.