HTC Vive Focus Vision Showcases the Problems of VR Headsets That Aren’t the Meta Quest 2025

Let’s say you’re tired of the limited visual capabilities of your Meta Quest 3 or Quest 3s. Perhaps you don’t want to support CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s anti-diversity crusade and wide-ranging layoffs. That’s why I went searching for another way to do XR that won’t cost seven times as much as the major player. Meta may have a stranglehold on consumer-end VR; should that mean there are no other wireless, base-station-less PCVR options? The HTC Vive Focus Vision is a great headset by itself, or it would be if PCVR were genuinely worth shelling out $1,000 for.

What should be the expectation for a $1,000 VR experience? Meta’s Quest series currently dominates the VR/AR realm, and the Quest 3 is $500. There are Pico headsets and Sony’s PlayStation VR2 that might fit the bill, but Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro misses the mark for a whole separate reason. You need something with controls that function for gaming, and you need it to turn on fast and book up games without extra hustle. The $1,000 HTC Vive Focus Vision has half of that, but the software is slipping into the past.

HTC’s XR headset includes two 90 Hz, 2448 by 2448 lenses with a combined resolution of 5K. It supports up to 120 degrees FOV and dual 2x driver directional speakers. Simply, it’s a solid headset to look at and listen to. I wasn’t jumping for headphones to complement the experience, and that wide field of vision was a boon for immersion (and slightly better than the Quest 3’s 110-degree FOV). The exterior of the device includes two 16 MP passthrough cameras that act as serviceable passthrough, and the device also includes two internal eye-tracking cameras. If you were merely going by specs, it feels like a fair balance between what you get with lower-end headsets. The PSVR2 may have OLED displays, but I didn’t feel like I was missing much for the sake of VR games in the HTC Vive Focus Vision.

All those specs make it seem solid. It’s running on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU with 12 GB of RAM. The device also has automatic PPD recognition, but I found this wasn’t as accurate as I would want. The device would constantly readjust PPD when I put the headset back on. Ignoring that issue, the Vive Focus Vision is a beautifully crafted headset. The battery pack is housed in a padded case on the rear end of a plastic strap. You can charge the battery externally or through the headset itself. The back headrest adjusts to a tight fit without feeling like you’re squishing your head, and the light seal keeps out the glow of a fully lit room.

Using the Focus Vision is another matter entirely. The weight in the back generates an odd sense of momentum when you turn your head. Despite the comfort, it is still a weighty device. After over two hours in the headset, it started to feel too uncomfortable. That’s about when the battery dies. That’s about as much as you can expect from either the Quest 3 or Vision Pro. At the very least, it’s more comfortable than either of those headsets, but it’s still not enough to get me wanting to use it for more than short bursts.

I used the HTC Vive Focus Vision for several weeks, and in that time, I felt like I was not getting $1,000 worth out of this device. I would constantly lose my play area no matter how often the Vive Focus Vision forced me to redrew the small living room in my apartment. I had to constantly reset the floor level using HTC’s poor hand-tracking capabilities. At one point, the software glitched and set the ground at a 20-degree slant. This would also track into SteamVR, and they wouldn’t reorient it until I took the headset to my office.

What dragged the experience down even more was the lack of unique experiences on HTC’s base app. The Vive Cosmos OS is only a vehicle for PCVR or SteamVR. There are a few VR experiences to buy from HTC’s store, but the field is barren of anything recognizable as the best VR experiences, like Asgard’s Wrath II.

Meta Quest has access to a Steam Link app that works well in most settings and has a solid internet connection. On the other hand, HTC requires a few more steps to access your SteamVR library. You could hook up the $150 Vive Wired Streaming Kit (which will mandate you have an extra outlet handy) or go through the Vive Hub app. I opted for the $20 Virtual Desktop app, which had less headache and setup and could work with minimal lag when located near my gaming laptop. It also requires a wired internet connection and marginally strong internet speeds.

Virtual Desktop works well enough for playing my games with minimal lag (except when I would step outside the headset’s boundaries, though that was an issue with the app’s compatibility). I was going through Half Life: Alyx and jumping into a few sessions of SuperHot VR and Star Wars: Squadrons. The controllers were solid, with some nice, stiff joysticks and triggers. Yet, the entire time, I knew my issue was I still had games on Meta’s Horizon OS that weren’t on the Vive. It’s not the company’s fault, but HTC is getting left behind. That’s sad for anybody who wants to try VR but can’t stand Meta.

This is a developer device first, and if you’re only set on PCVR, the device offers solid gaming, though with a minefield of caveats. Last month, Google spent $250 million to acquire HTC’s VR as the tech giant works with Samsung to develop its own device to rival the Vision Pro. These future devices may or may not have controller support, and since it’s still in the early days, Meta is still the best bang for the buck VR device. I’m hoping other devices fielding HorizonOS crop up this year. As an industry, VR needs a kick in the pants, and Meta shouldn’t be the only company with the boots to do it.