The first VR wave sold headsets and then collected dust. The second wave is quieter, cheaper and considerably better, mostly because the hardware stopped fighting the user.
What genuinely improved
- Weight and balance: hours-long comfort is now plausible.
- Inside-out tracking: no base stations to mount.
- Passthrough quality: mixed reality stopped looking like a smear.
- Standalone silicon: no PC required for mainstream titles.
What still disappoints
Text clarity at a distance, long-session comfort in warm rooms, and the library. Most titles are still short experiences rather than the hundred-hour games players expect from a console.
Buying advice that holds
Buy for the games that exist, not for the roadmap. Check the return policy, because comfort is personal and untestable in a shop. Prefer a headset with a replaceable strap and battery, since those are the parts that fail first.
Bottom line: VR is finally a reasonable purchase for a specific kind of player. It is still a bad purchase for a general one.
