<--- Back

My VR Experience

Last Updated: 21/03/2025

This ia a yap about Beat Saber, and VR in general. I love VR. It's so cool. Not just playing VR, but VR technology itsself. For some reason I find the technology behind VR devices so fascinating, especially the lighthouse tracking system. I genuinely spent ages reading about how the system works because it's so interesting.

Anyway, that's not for now. I'll start with my history with VR. My first VR experience was in 2018 on my 12th birthday, where I went to a local VR place (sadly now shut down after Covid). I believe they would have been using original Vives, but I dont really remember many details. I remember playing a few different games but the only one I remember was job simulator. I believe I went back there with my friends at a later date, where I played job simulator pretty much the whole time.

Some time afterwards, probably mid 2019, one of my friends got the original Oculus Quest. It was so cool to be able to play the games as at the VR place at my friends house. At the time, standalone VR was brand new and I had barely touchec VR before so it was pretty cool.

After this, I didn't have much VR experience. I never had a headset of my own, and couldn't go to my friend's during covid. Some of my friends got quests too, some the original Quest and some the Quest 2. I played them a few times when I was round at their houses.

The first VR headset I got myself was actually the Quest 1, in late 2023. One of my friends who had a Quest 1 got the new Quest 3, and sold me their old Quest for £50. It was a pretty good deal, even for the original Quest. The first game I bought was beat saber, which I had played a bit at my friends' as they played it a lot. That is where it started.

Beat Saber was practically the only VR game I played. For a short while, I played it almost daily until I accidentally threw one of the controllers (as they were missing straps) and it spectacularly exploded into many pieces. In January of 2024, I got myself a Quest 3 and wow it was such an upgrade. High resolution, pancake optics, full colour passthrough, and 120hz. Of course it was used almost exclusively for Beat Saber.

The Quest 3 is what I used for most of my time playing Beat Saber, and got me to my current skill level. It's a great headset and well worth the money (if you can put aside Meta being a terrible company...). I also started using Quest Link to play the PC version of Beat Saber with mods, which I could never get to be a perfect experience due to Quest Link's encoding struggling to keep up at 120hz even on my 6950xt at low res. Maybe I will talk about this at some point, as I could complain a lot about Quest Link.

In Januay 2025, I was browsing eBay and found a full Valve Index kit for surprisingly cheap. I had been looking for a PC native headset for a little while, and I was immediately interested. I put it in my watchlist and the seller offered a discount shortly after. I showed my friend and they said: "You have a job for a reason". To which I thought: "Yeah, fuck it" and bought the Index.

Was it worth it? Yes. Absolutely. I had previously put off the index for being old and low resolution for the price, but immediately when I got it and set it up it was an amazing experience. Sure, the screens are lower res than the Quest 3, and the lenses don't have as large a sweet spot, everything else about the experience is an upgrade. Comfort: way better even with my bobovr strap for the Quest. Sound: amazing with the over ear speakers. Brightness: blinding thanks to the fresnel lenses not blocking as much light as pancake lenses. (Side note, pancake lenses only transmit anout 8-15 percent of light due to internal reflections). Controllers: amazing. Tracking: best in class.

The Index is the best headset I have used despite being nearly 6 years old. It has made my Beat Saber experience so much better. It also lead to me playing another game a lot more too......

VRChat. You probably know what it is. I have started playing a lot of VRChat recently, for a number of reasons. The finger tracked controllers made it easy to make any hand pose, and the comfort made it possible to play for a long time. Also, I may have been motivated to play because of being Trans. Yeah, sounds like a strange reason but look at it this way. VRChat is very immersive, and allows you to be something other than your real self. You can present any way you want in the game no matter how you appear in real life. Also, there is a world called the Trans Academy which is a really nice place to hang out, and I actually end up taking to people for hours until quite late (or early I guess....)

VRChat also led me to get full body tracking, using 3 Vive 3.0 Trackers. It's so cool to be able to see your legs and body moving in VR.

Anyway, that's my VR experience. Not too exciting but I like to yap about things that interest me.

I probably completely deviated from what I meant to write but really these pages are just whatever comes into my head as I am writing.

<--- Back

Last updated: 21/03/2025