c’t 3003 has tested the Meta Quest 2 in great detail and shows why you want this VR headset – and what speaks against it. Also: The five best games.
Transcript of the video:
In this video I tell you why VR is dead in some areas and why it is mega successful in other areas. And why the Quest 2 is currently the only headset you want. And what speaks against it. Plus: My very own five favorite Quest 2 games.
Phew, yes, I’ve been in virtual reality almost every day for nine years now, and to be honest, I foresaw a huge success at the beginning. In 2013 I even convinced the c’t editorial team that the Oculus Rift URGENTly has to be on the title because it was a big revolution. Well, the hype was there, but the sales figures remained ridiculously small. In the meantime, VR was even so-called click poison for online journalists: If VR was on it somewhere, you could assume that no one would click on it.
It stayed that way for several years, even if the shrink-wrapped VR freaks, including myself, of course stayed with it. But even an OVER-GAME like Half-Life: Alyx, where we VR folks all thought THAT’S NOW GOING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING; Well, that didn’t even begin to mean that VR headsets somehow became the PC gaming standard. And even if Half-Life: Alyx was in my opinion the best and most technically groundbreaking game of the last few years since Breath of the Wild; I would go so far as to say: VR on the PC is currently dead, at least in the mainstream area. However, VR has conquered a niche among simulation freaks, i.e. in the field of sim racing and flight simulation. But not otherwise.
Well, and now the huge success is brewing from a completely different corner: The completely self-sufficient VR headset Oculus, err, Meta Quest 2 sells like slices of bread. Qualcomm estimates that the Quest 2 system on a chip has now sold 10 million items. For comparison: the Valve Index PC VR headset was only sold 150,000 times in 2019. And what on top of that makes the dimensions of Quest 2’s success clear: in 2021, more units of the VR headset were sold than any Xbox consoles. And that’s really awesome now.
Quest 2 is currently not available in Germany due to stress with the Federal Cartel Office. But you can simply order the part from Amazon France, for example, for the normal price of 350 euros for the 128 GB version. I’ve tried it myself, it works without any problems. By the way, it is rumored that official sales in Germany will start again in the new year, but so far these are rumors.
I’ve been using Quest 2 here since its release in October 2020 and spent many, many hours with it. Here are my reasons why you want this thing (and what speaks against it):
Reason 1: SO SIMPLE
The Oculus Quest 2 is just so easy to use, it’s just super pleasant. PC headsets are not that complicated now either, but you always have to connect something, update some software and move something out of the way in the room where the PC is so that you can move about freely. You just take Quest 2 somewhere where there is space, because you don’t need a cable connection. And that’s just a game changer. You put the thing on, bang, feddich. Incidentally, I have prescription lenses from VR opticians in here, which cost 65 euros and make life so much easier for people who wear glasses – even if you can theoretically leave your glasses on, but without it is more pleasant.
Reason 2: SOFTWARE
Oculus, uh Facebook, uh Meta, just throws so unbelievably a lot of money into the ecosystem that no other manufacturer can even begin to keep up. There are other self-sufficient headsets, for example the Vive Focus 3, which is at least as good in terms of hardware. But the Quest ecosystem with all the software, a lot of it exclusive titles – that just pulls. Here are my five current favorite games:
Star Wars. Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge: I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan now, but trailing through beautiful space fairytale worlds with one of these cool Pighpigh laser creaks, that catches me after all. It’s also just cool when R2D2 is standing in front of you and you bend down and fix it with the wrench. The game is otherwise a pretty conventional shooter, which of course can’t keep up with Half-Life: Alyx graphically (because it runs on Quest 2 and not on a fat gaming PC), but I definitely had a few hours of great fun.
Superhot VR: For me the absolute VR long-runner. The cool, super minimalist design, that feeling that time stops when you don’t move and just badass with throwing stars can feel like a super action hero ninja, that’s just awesome. Incidentally, runs on Quest 2 at a smooth 120 Hz.
The Room VR: A Dark Matter: This is a rather slow puzzle game, which catches me above all about the great atmosphere. You really feel like you are somehow in 1910 in Victorian Sherlock Holmes London; that’s really really great, if a little creepy.
Resident Evil 4 VR: Yes, ok, keyword scary, Resident Evil games are scary anyway, but in VR they shock differently. Resi 4 is already a bit out of date graphically and looks like 2005 at the Gamecube, but the VR implementation is much better than, for example, the more beautiful, but less playable in VR Resident Evil 7.
Pistol Whip: It doesn’t always have to be Beat Saber if you want to frantically fidget with the controllers! With Pistol Whip you float through futuristically designed shooting gallery backdrops, yes, and shoot two pistols to the beat of the music.
Reason 3: Meetings in VR
I realize, of course, that almost nobody is doing meetings in VR at the moment. Aaaaber: Once you’ve tried that, you immediately check that it makes sense. Personally, I find video meetings about Zoom, Teams or something else incredibly exhausting, they just pull the energy out of my brain – for example, you always have to make sure that you are in the picture, that you don’t have half a croissant stuck in your beard, that in the Background nothing embarrassing happened. At least in VR I feel a lot safer because I am not seen as a video image, but as an avatar. I also look respectable when I have nuts in my beard. Plus, I don’t have to sit where the camera sees me, as if glued to it, I can just walk around. It’s just so much more relaxed.
Reason 4: movement
Speaking of walking around: Video games are associated with lazy rummaging around on the couch. This is also possible in VR, but you can play a lot of things while standing with full physical effort. On days like that when the weather is bad and I think, meh, a little exercise would be cool: Then I put the thing on myself and crush a few music blocks in Beat Saber. This is not only a super entertaining game, it can also make you sweat. There are also Quest titles, like FitXR, which offer boxing, dance and interval workouts like in the gym. I haven’t tested FitXR in detail yet, but last year I tested Supernatural VR very intensively, where real fitness trainers offer new courses every day. Unfortunately, because of the music rights, Supernatural is now geo-blocked, so I can no longer use it without a VPN. But: Meta has just bought Supernatural, I assume that they will clear the worldwide music rights soon. (The U.S. antitrust authorities are currently reviewing the purchase.)
Reason 5: wireless streaming
I just said that PC-VR is dead, but sometimes you might want to use it, for example with Half Life Alyx. Well, and that’s even possible with the Quest 2, either via USB cable or, much cooler, wirelessly via WLAN. In the beginning it only worked with third-party software such as Virtual Desktop, but the function is now officially built in and is called “Air Link”. I tested it: Under optimal conditions, i.e. Wi-Fi 6 router nearby, 2 GHz WLAN deactivated, I would go so far as to say: You don’t see any difference to the wired version. But really only under optimal conditions. If you don’t have one, you can still use a USB cable.
The counter-argument: Meta is problematic
So, and now what speaks AGAINST Quest 2: I’ll say that very diplomatically: Of all the large Silicon Valley giant corporations, Facebook * slash * Meta is definitely the one that has attracted attention most frequently in recent years due to problematic practices. The English Wikipedia article on “Criticism of Facebook” is almost 200,000 characters long. The probable reason why Meta does not sell Quest 2 in Germany has to do with one of these points of criticism: The Federal Cartel Office has initiated abuse proceedings because the Quest can only be used with a Facebook account – according to the Cartel Office, this may be illegal abuse a dominant position. But that’s also nasty for data protection reasons: It’s completely unclear whether Meta might have any VR movement patterns – where do I look and when? – linked to other data about me and used this data collection for targeted advertising sales. And that is definitely problematic; especially if you use the same data for Quest, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. But: Perhaps you made a mistake in the name of the Facebook account required for the quest? Something like that happens before: And if this account is really only used for VR and nothing else, there is a lot less data about you that Facebook can sell to advertisers.
Overall, I find these and other Meta business practices very problematic, and yet I love Quest 2. How do you see it? I look forward to your comments – and say goodbye!
c’t 3003 is the c’t YouTube channel. The videos on c’t 3003 are independent content and independent of the articles in c’t magazin. Editor Jan-Keno Janssen and video producers Johannes Börnsen and Şahin Erengil publish a video every week.
(jkj)