Late to the VR party, but the party is just getting started
I finally got a VR headset. A Meta Quest 3. And yes, I know I’m late. Most people who were going to try VR already did years ago. The hype cycle peaked and moved on. But sometimes being late means you get to skip the rough early days and walk straight into something that actually works.
And it works. It really works.
Not the trendy thing anymore
Let’s be honest. VR is not the hot topic in tech right now. AI is. And I get it. As someone who spends most of my time working with AI tools and building things with them, I understand why the industry shifted its attention. AI is transforming everything, from how we write code to how we design products to how entire businesses operate. It’s a bigger deal in terms of immediate, widespread impact.
Meta knows this too. Back in October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg made one of the boldest corporate bets in history. He renamed Facebook to Meta, signaling that the company’s future was the metaverse. The stock ticker changed to META. They poured over $36 billion into their Reality Labs division between 2020 and 2023. Zuckerberg told investors this was a long-term play that would define the next era of computing.
But the metaverse hype cooled fast. Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship social VR platform, struggled to attract users and never drew more than a couple hundred thousand monthly active users. The stock dropped over 70% in 2022. Reality Labs posted billions in operating losses, including $6.02 billion in Q4 2025 alone. Investors pushed back hard. And then ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 and suddenly AI was all anyone could talk about. Meta pivoted. They started investing heavily in AI, releasing open source models like LLaMA, building AI assistants, and integrating AI across their apps. The metaverse wasn’t abandoned, but it was no longer the main story.
Then in March 2026, Meta announced it would shut down Horizon Worlds on VR entirely, removing it from the Quest store by March 31 and planning to kill VR access by June 15. They said they were “separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus” and turning Horizon into a mobile-only experience. The signal was clear: the metaverse as Zuckerberg originally pitched it was being quietly shelved. A day later, CTO Andrew Bosworth walked it back slightly, saying they had decided to keep Horizon Worlds working in VR after the backlash. But it’s still being deprioritized in favor of native VR games and experiences. The grand metaverse vision has been replaced by something more practical.
As Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, once said:
“Virtual reality is the first step in a grand adventure into the landscape of the imagination.”
That grand adventure hasn’t been cancelled. It just got quieter and more focused.
The Quest 3 is a great entry point
The Meta Quest 3 costs around $500. Apple’s Vision Pro starts at $3,499 and goes up from there. That’s seven times the price, and the Vision Pro isn’t even available in most countries. The Quest 3 is a standalone device, no PC required, no external sensors, no cables. You put it on, set up your room boundary, and you’re in.
The mixed reality passthrough is what surprised me the most. The Quest 3 has full color passthrough cameras that let you see your real environment while digital objects are layered on top of it. This is extended reality, or XR, and it changes the experience completely compared to older headsets where you were fully closed off from the world.
Seeing a portal open up in your living room wall, with an alien world visible on the other side, is genuinely magical. Having creatures climb through your actual walls and crawl across your real furniture is the kind of thing that makes you laugh out loud the first time. It sounds like a gimmick until you experience it. Then it clicks. This is something new.
The headset landscape right now
If you’re thinking about getting into VR or XR, here’s how the main options compare in 2026:
| Headset | Price | Standalone | Color passthrough | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Quest 3S | ~$299 | Yes | Yes | Budget entry point, same chip as Quest 3 |
| Meta Quest 3 | ~$499 | Yes | Yes (high quality) | Best all-round value for VR and XR |
| Sony PSVR2 | ~$399 | No (PS5 required) | No | Console gaming with OLED HDR displays |
| Apple Vision Pro | $3,499 | Yes | Yes (best in class) | Premium spatial computing, sharpest displays |
| Meta Ray-Ban Display | ~$799 | Yes (glasses form) | Real world (no VR) | AI-powered smart glasses with a small display |
The Quest 3S is worth mentioning because it delivers about 80% of the Quest 3 experience at 60% of the price. Same processor, same game library, just slightly lower passthrough quality and screen resolution. For a first-time buyer who wants to spend as little as possible, it’s a smart choice.
The PSVR2 is a great gaming headset with beautiful OLED displays and strong contrast, but it requires a PlayStation 5 and doesn’t do mixed reality passthrough. It’s purpose-built for gaming and does that well.
The Vision Pro is in a different league entirely. Its micro-OLED displays are the sharpest in any consumer headset, the passthrough is so good it barely looks like a camera feed, and the eye and hand tracking is remarkably intuitive. But at seven times the price of a Quest 3, and only available in a few markets, it’s not where most people are going to start. Apple knows this too. There have been persistent rumors about a more affordable model, sometimes called the Vision Air, that would come in at roughly half the price by swapping glass for plastic, reducing the number of sensors, and using an iPhone chip instead of a Mac one. That would put it around $1,750, which is still not cheap but a lot more reasonable. Reports suggest Apple has paused that work to focus on AI-powered smart glasses instead, but a lighter and cheaper Vision headset still seems inevitable at some point. Apple clearly wants to bring spatial computing to more people, and pricing is the biggest barrier right now.
Meta’s glasses play
What interests me almost as much as VR headsets is where Meta is going with glasses. They launched the Meta Ray-Ban Display at Connect 2025 for $799. These are actual Ray-Ban glasses with a small built-in display and Meta AI integration. You can check messages, see translations, preview photos, and talk to the AI assistant, all without pulling out your phone. Battery life is up to eight hours. They look like normal glasses, which is a huge deal for adoption.
Then there’s Orion, Meta’s prototype AR glasses with a 70-degree field of view and full holographic displays. These are the real vision for the future. Lightweight glasses with proper augmented reality, not just a notification layer but actual digital objects in your space. The consumer version, codenamed Artemis, is expected around 2027. If they can pull it off at a reasonable price, that could be the device that changes everything.
The progression is clear. Bulky VR headsets today, smart glasses with a small display now, full AR glasses in a year or two. Each step gets lighter, more social, and more integrated into everyday life.
The cinema in your face
One of the simplest use cases is also one of the best. You put on the headset, open a streaming app, and suddenly you have a massive screen floating in front of you. It feels like sitting in a private cinema. The screen is enormous, the environment is dark and focused, and the spatial audio adds to the immersion. For watching movies or shows, especially when you don’t have a big TV or a dedicated room, it’s surprisingly great.
It’s not perfect. The resolution could be higher and the headset gets warm after extended use. The battery lasts about two hours for intensive use, which is barely enough for a movie. But as a first step, it shows where this is going. Future headsets will be lighter, sharper, and last longer. The experience will only get better.
So much more than gaming
Gaming gets most of the attention when people talk about VR, but the use cases that excite me the most are the ones that go beyond entertainment.
Travel and remote viewing. You can put on a headset and stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, walk through the streets of Tokyo, or float above the Great Barrier Reef. It’s not the same as being there, but it’s surprisingly close. For people who can’t travel easily, whether because of cost, health, or time, this is genuinely meaningful. And for live events it gets even more interesting. Imagine watching a concert from the front row, or sitting courtside at a basketball game, all from your living room. As 360-degree and volumetric capture improves, the line between being there and watching from a headset will keep getting thinner.
Interior design and decoration. This is where mixed reality with passthrough really shines. Imagine pointing your headset at your living room and swapping out the sofa, changing the wall color, or placing a new lamp on the table to see how it looks before you buy anything. IKEA and others already have AR apps on phones, but doing it in full scale with a headset is a completely different experience. You’re not looking at a tiny rendering on a phone screen. You’re seeing a full-size piece of furniture in your actual room. For bigger decisions like kitchen renovations or bathroom remodels, being able to visualize the result in real space before committing is incredibly valuable.
Architecture and spatial planning. Architects and designers can walk clients through a building before a single brick is laid. You can stand inside a room that doesn’t exist yet and get a real sense of the proportions, the light, the flow between spaces. That’s something flat renderings and even 3D models on a screen can never fully convey. The spatial understanding you get from being inside a design is on another level.
Garden planning. This one might sound niche but it’s a perfect XR use case. You walk into your garden with the headset on, and through passthrough you see your real outdoor space with virtual plants, trees, paths, and structures layered on top. Want to see how a hedge would look along the fence? Place it and walk around it. Curious about a new patio layout? Drop it in and see how the proportions feel. Landscaping is expensive and hard to undo, so being able to preview changes at full scale in your actual garden before digging anything up is a real advantage.
Education and training. Medical students can practice surgery on virtual patients. Mechanics can learn to take apart an engine without needing a real one. You can explore the inside of a cell, walk on the surface of Mars, or stand in ancient Rome. The ability to learn by experiencing something rather than reading about it is powerful. This is one of the areas where VR could have the biggest long-term impact.
Most of these use cases are already possible today in some form. They’re just rough around the edges. As the hardware and software improve, each of them gets more practical and more compelling. And when AI gets layered on top, things get really interesting. Imagine an AI assistant that can see your room through the passthrough cameras and suggest furniture arrangements, identify plants in your garden and recommend what to add, or guide you through a repair step by step with virtual overlays. That combination of XR and AI feels like where a lot of this is heading.
What I see in the future
I think what we’re seeing today in VR and XR is like the early days of smartphones. The iPhone in 2007 was exciting but limited. No App Store, no GPS navigation, no proper camera. The real magic came in the years after, as the hardware improved and developers figured out what was possible.
VR and XR need the same evolution. The passthrough needs to be as sharp as real vision. The headsets need to shrink to the size of regular glasses. Battery life needs to be all-day. Performance needs to handle complex environments without stuttering. All of this is coming. It’s just engineering and time. The foundational technology is already here.
When that happens, when you can put on a pair of lightweight glasses and have your entire workspace, entertainment, and communication layer float around you in your real environment, that changes computing fundamentally. No more monitors on desks. No more TVs on walls. Just space, augmented with whatever you need.
Building for XR
I’m just getting started with the Quest 3. I want to try different games and experiences to understand what works and what doesn’t. But I’m also curious about building something for XR. A simple, fun experience that plays with the mixed reality capabilities. Maybe something that uses your real room in creative ways. The development tools are accessible now and with Unity or the Meta SDK you can prototype things relatively quickly.
There’s another angle that excites me even more. VR headsets are increasingly being used for robot teleoperation. You put on a headset, see through a robot’s eyes, and control its movements with your hands. Companies like Figure and others are using this approach to collect training data for AI models that will eventually let robots operate autonomously. I wrote about the robot revolution recently, and being able to combine VR with robotics training is something I can see myself exploring.
Not dead, just early
The narrative right now is that VR failed and AI won. I don’t think that’s right. AI is having its moment, and it deserves it. But VR and XR didn’t fail. They just haven’t had their real moment yet. The technology needs to mature, the form factor needs to shrink, and the experiences need to get smoother. But the core of it, blending digital and physical reality, is too powerful an idea to stay niche forever.
The Quest 3S at $299 and the Quest 3 at $499 are proof that this technology is becoming accessible. The Vision Pro at $3,499 is proof that the high end is already impressive. Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses show that the form factor is shrinking fast. And somewhere along that trajectory, in the next few years, we’ll get the device that makes this mainstream.
I’m glad I finally stepped in. Late to the party, sure. But I think the real party hasn’t even started yet.
