Virtual Reality

Tim's VR Background

Tim has been tracking VR for at least five years, buying different headsets along the way. He's owned a Meta Quest 2 for over a year, using it daily at first and at least weekly since. He tried everything early on — games, social apps, 360 videos, virtual museum tours — before settling into a narrow set of regular uses.

The Pros: 360-Degree Immersion

The standout feature is the 360-degree view. Tim's favorite uses:

• Virtual tourism via Wander — an app that scrapes Google Street View and user-submitted 3D photos. Tim has explored Pyongyang, stood at the base of the Great Pyramid in Cairo (noting the nearby Pizza Hut with a pyramid view), visited Antarctica, the Faroe Islands seed vault, cities across Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Americas.
• 360 YouTube videos — space documentaries ("let's explore the Andromeda galaxy"), hanggliding, scuba diving, and other experiences he'd never do in real life.
• Virtual museum visits — he walked through the entire British Natural History Museum via VR while chatting with a friend who was physically there in London. It worked surprisingly well until they hit an exhibit that had been swapped out since the virtual version was captured.
• IMAX-style movie watching — YouTube Premium lets him project videos onto a virtual giant theater screen, though he caps out at about 90 minutes.

The Cons: Comfort, Accounts, and Ads

Physical Discomfort

The Quest 2 is heavy, tight, and warm. Tim can wear it for about an hour maximum — less on warm days. He gets sweaty around the silicone face cover, and his nose leaves a light gap that requires over-tightening the head strap. He bought prescription clip-on lenses (a genuine improvement), but the fundamental weight and pressure issues remain.

Account Hostility

The headset originally required a Facebook account, which Tim didn't have — he deleted all social media in 2016 "for good reasons." He created one solely for VR registration. Months later, Meta forced migration to Meta accounts, requiring yet another account creation and purchase migration. Tim calls the process "user hostile."

Advertising

• Physical mail ads (eventually unsubscribed)
• Pop-up app promotions every time the headset turns on, replacing his chosen home environment
• Tim's verdict: "I paid a lot for this and I don't need to have ads thrown in my face every single time I put it on my head"

No Killer App

The biggest con: nothing makes VR feel essential. Tim tried Skyrim VR and found it "super cool" to be inside the world in 3D, but he's not going to play for hours with a heavy headset. No game has truly hooked him. Good apps exist, but no must-have ones.

AR Is the Real Future

Tim personally hopes everything moves to augmented reality. His dream use cases:

• Driving directions as arrows overlaid on the real world
• Social cues — seeing someone's name and a reminder to ask about their kid
• Virtual TV — AR glasses making it look like a giant screen is in his living room
• Tabletop D&D — friends, dice, and maps all virtual on a real table, with DM-only information visible only to the DM

He sees AR as fundamentally more useful because you stay in reality while enhancing it, rather than replacing it entirely.

Current VR Verdict

Tim compares the current state of VR to the Atari VCS era — not because of graphics, but because "so many things aren't figured out yet." Each headset generation is meaningfully better than the last, so he remains cautiously optimistic. But today is "not that year."

He has never made a VR game and doesn't feel any of his game ideas require VR — they'd all work better on PC or console. That said, he acknowledges this could change as the hardware improves.