HTC Vive XR Elite Virtual Reality Headset + Controllers

I own several consumer and enterprise hmds from Meta, Pico, and HTC, and my current favorite is the HTC Vive XR Elite for the following reasons:(1) The headset is very light and comfortable when using the fabric facial interface, overhead strap, and battery cradle. It fits my average-size face and nose well, is nicely balanced, and the fan keeps everything cool and the optics free of condensation. Thankfully, there's no need to use the enclosed glasses wings (which feel like giant tweezers pinching behind your ears). HTC needs to offer longer replacement wings for the headset to be usable in "glasses mode."(2) The unique diopter adjustment is a godsend for people like me who are nearsighted and would prefer not to wear glasses or contacts when using an hmd. The pancake lenses give a crystal-clear view with a wide sweet spot and no god rays. There's a bit of cloudiness and light bleed in high contrast scenes, but it's not noticeable in most cases.(3) The new MR face gasket (2 for $25) is excellent for mixed reality applications, allowing use of peripheral vision. It provides a sufficient offset so that people with astigmatism can wear corrective lenses (which is not possible with the fabric facial interface). It's also helpful for novice users who become disoriented or experience motion sickness with fully immersive VR interfaces.(4) The XR Elite delivers on other important dimensions, including image resolution, video pass-through, audio quality, and tracking, with performance that's as good or better than other, competitive headsets. The original list price ($1,099) is a hard sell, but with recent price cuts, promotions, and "used-like new" options available, the headset can be an excellent value. Of course, the competitive landscape continues to change, with the launch of the Quest 3 and next year's release of the Pico 5 and Apple Vision Pro. Until there's an HMD with significantly better performance, I'll continue using the XR Elite as my daily driver.(If you buy an XR Elite, note that the equipment fits fine in non-OEM cases for the Vive Focus 3, which uses the same controllers. Also, to eliminate controller battery drain when you're done using the equipment, press and hold the Vive buttons until they fully power off.)

I got my unit today, and I have to say; ALL of my expectations were wrong.I'm absolutely gobsmacked at how bad the experience is. I'm coming from a Rift S; so I was under the, false, impression that no matter how bad this ended up being, it'd be so far above the rift that'd I'd be plenty happy to trudge through the early adopter tax and growing pains.I can't. The UI is so shoddy that after a couple hours using it I was overflowing with the desire to submit for a refund and buy a quest pro. I despise facebook, passionately; but I'd rather get back into bed with them, than bytedance, and there are no other standalone wireless options to speak of.Here are a few of my takeaway Pros and Cons.PROSPCVR latency on Wifi 6 (5ghz) was actually really good. (see first Con in list below for more context) The first thing I did was, open Beatsaber and test out some E+ songs. The saber movement felt accurate and realtime, as compared to my typical displayport tethered setup.Screen quality is nice, but honestly not jaw-dropping or anything. I was expecting this to be a big upgrade, considering the Rift S is relatively low res and has Fresnel lenses, but it kind of felt equivalent/worse on the XRE, even after acclimating to the sweet spot.The unit itself is tiny, shockingly tiny. The compactness of it blew my mind, after holding it in my hands, I'm convinced we're only a few generations away from near sunglasses sizes of HMDs.I had NO ISSUES with setup, or with pairing for wireless PCVR, everything connected more or less immediately. The instructions were sometimes poorly worded, but mechanically, each step worked out as would be expected. **I did have to segregate my 2.4ghz network, because it was preferring it over my 5ghz when I was allowing the router to decide.The 2nd accessory USB-C port(beside the right eye lens) does support USC-C Audio, so when I plugged in my 3.5mm adapter, it worked instantly with no configuration or other steps. The port is deeply recessed though, so the majority of USB-C ends will probably not fit. I used the official adapter that Apple sells, it has very thin insulation on the cable end.The in-arm speakers are excellent, better than most would expect. I had no issues with stereo positioning while using them. Aside from privacy uses, I don't think I'd have used my headphones for anything else.The unit is capable of functioning, in glasses mode, for a while on the 15W from a standard PC USB-C port. It does drain the internal battery, but that will depend entirely on your use case. The inability to get consistent tracking results seemed to constantly cause it to spin up into full power while searching for the controllers and landmarks. So it's hard to say how long I would get away with it. Seemed like an hour or two would be possible with light-ish use.The full color pass-through was really nice. Had no problem walking around, fixing myself a drink, reorganizing things around the room, etc... Very nice. There was definitely some warping in the image, so someone who is focused on AR/MR might find it intolerable; but for the home user in a casual setting, it was super useful to get around and do stuff without taking off the headset.CONSController and Hand tracking is abysmal. I'm shocked at how poorly this tracks in low-medium light settings. I can put on my Rift S, in a fully dark room, with only a TV offering indirect lighting, and it tracks extremely well. The XRE needs every light in the room on maximum brightness, or it will constantly lose tracking. This made playing high level Beatsaber almost impossible under normal lighting conditions. If I turn on all my lights I get passable tracking, otherwise the controllers would lose tracking during any quick motions. Even with all my lights on, it had a VERY hard time tracking movement on the outer edges of the play-space. This can be improved with software over time, because it's clear the predictive algorithms facebook uses for the Rift S can outperform it on older hardware using the same type of camera+controller gyro setup.The screen glare/light bleed are annoying. The blurriness you get from Fresnel lenses is, in my estimation, equivalent to the lens glare on the XRE's pancakes. It's not like I'm not used to it on my Rift, but I really thought the pancake lenses would be a huge increase in clarity. I see these as essentially a 1:1 swap.The OS is terrible. It looks pretty, and the options I sought out were almost always where I expected them to be in their respective menus; however, the OS itself was rife with bugs. Swapping in and out of apps would cause inexplicable system hangs that would have bizarre compounding effects, like sporadically unpairing the controllers until I did a hard system reset. This would happen in standalone and PCVR, however, the issues were far more severe on PCVR and required frequent resets and reopening PC apps and steam VR in a "just-so" method to allow it to function without breaking.The ability to reorient yourself is treated like a one-time initial device setup, instead of something you'd do constantly. This might just be an issue of how I use VR. Sometimes I'm on my couch, or standing in my VR space, or sitting at my desk. In the Oculus software, I can just long-press my menu button in the home screen and I'm instantly reoriented to my current facing. I probably do this half a dozen times in every VR session: whenever I move over in my chair, or lean back on the couch, or move over while standing for better positioning, etc... The XRE experience is terrible in this regard, it loses it's relative position without warning or skews the home screen position to some nonsense location and direction, but its "reset position" option, in the one tap menu popup, rarely reorients true to your heading, and often tries to honor some absolute positioning it has decided on it's own. Once you combine this with the repositioning of apps in steamvr, it's compounded into a nightmare of rinse-repeat in both interfaces until the app you're running is finally aligned correctly.The boundary settings are extremely limiting and can't be disabled. This is one of the most damning things in my list. If you set a huge boundary to avoid being interrupted by it, you'll be punished by the system relocating your displays all over the place. If you use stationary, you'd better stay still. Your floor position may change sporadically if tracking is lost temporarily. Any deviations from the boundaries, in stationary or room-scale, seem to have a 50/50 chance of causing standalone apps to crash, or streaming to crash, or to cause a system hang that needs a hard reset. This is all ridiculous to me, because, while I don't need boundaries, anyone who does, would probably have an awful experience with it. When I set up my Rift S years ago, by the 2nd week I'd turned off guardian completely, and I've never gone back; but even when it was on, it never broke system operation.Hand tracking, technically works. I've never had a hand tracking headset before, so I don't know if it's this awful on other hardware too; but it seems like to function at the level of a gimmick. It seems to struggle tremendously with the changing shape of hands as they move or rotate; which strikes me as the sort of thing that would be first-in-line-things-to-resolve in a hand tracking system. Like the controllers, it requires as much light as possible, and it's not usable in low-med light scenarios. The idea of taking the XRE anywhere without its controllers seems impossible to me.As others have mentioned; in the glasses mode, the arms will dig a hole into your head if your head is too large. It was pretty painful for me after ~40minutes, so if you decide to work through it, you'll probably have to sort out secondary padding. It's not bad at all with the battery pack attached, it feels like a normal headset in that mode.The central fixed-foveated rendering is way more aggressive than I'd have liked, it was very noticeable anytime I was in an environment with textured walls and especially for text, looking around with my eyes left delivered an unacceptable visual mess. I haven't used wireless VR before, so maybe this is a limitation of the XR2 platform and not HTC's fault; but, if it's on HTC, it's a huge negative. I have the hardware and bandwidth to easily push 2-3x what the headset is asking for, I'd have preferred user-control over the reduced peripheral quality. settings:200mpbs/ULTRA/DynamicOFFOverall, this was a huge let down for me. I was thrilled to finally divorce facebook, in regard to my VR experiences, but it's just too soon for me. HTC can improve a lot of what's wrong with this headset through software, but based on just how rough it is right now, I think that'll be more than a year away...