fluffy on cohost

Ooh, this is a great question. I don't have a great answer right now, because the world of VR is in a state of flux.

Also I've ended up rewriting it a bunch of times because my brain continues to be Like That.

Shorter answer

The most comfortable and affordable way to play VRChat right now is to use a Quest 2 and Virtual Desktop (if you have good wifi) or a USB link cable. The Quest 3 is probably worth waiting for in order to get a bit more comfort and visual quality. Also Quest 3 improves on the hand and controller tracking which is great for immersion.

I would not recommend VRChat in Quest standalone mode, because the experience is much more limited. But as a PCVR headset the Quest line is Pretty Good.

For VRChat on a PC you'll need a decent GPU. I'd recommend a 2070 at a minimum although you can get away with as little as a 1050Ti. nVidia is way better-supported in general.

If you have a dedicated playspace and a bit more money, Valve Index or Bigscreen Beyond are worth looking into. Index is available now and has a slightly wider FOV; Beyond is "coming soon," has a narrower FOV, but much better optics, and is custom-molded to your face and is the lightest headset on the market at this time.

Excruciatingly long answer

I currently have three VR setups at home: a PSVR (original), a Quest 2, and a Pimax 5K+. I have also used a number of other VR headsets over the years; my first VR experience was playing Descent on a DOS-based VR rig in the mid-90s, and I worked at HBO's¹ VR lab for a few years where I spent a lot of time using the original Vive and the Rift S, among other flash-in-the-pan devices that never went anywhere and weren't worth using even back then.

Of the ones I've directly used, the Quest 2 is the most comfortable (especially when paired with a Kiwi Design strap and controller grips), but it still leaves a lot to be desired. As a standalone device it's underpowered, and even when used with a PC (via Quest Link, Virtual Desktop, etc.) there's a significant drop in video quality and sometimes an appreciable amount of lag, and this is unavoidable because all PC support is based on streaming video from the PC. These issues occur even over a direct USB connection.

The Pimax 5K+ has a very wide field of view (which is great for immersion), but it's heavy (which is bad for comfort), and while it has a higher resolution than the Quest, the extreme FOV means it has a much lower pixel density, so visuals aren't nearly as sharp. There's newer Pimax headsets with higher pixel density but that also comes with needing higher-end GPUs. So far I don't really feel like the increased FOV is worth the tradeoffs.

When evaluating VR tech, there's a few things to keep in mind.

Standalone vs PC-based

Standalone VR headsets like the Quest and Pico4 are fun as little self-contained VR experiences. There's less to buy and less to setup, and the overall cost of entry is way lower.

But the standalone CPUs and GPUs are way underpowered, and so they're only really usable for low-power environments. Those environments also tend to be very locked-down; modding Beat Saber is a pain in the ass on Quest, for example, and Meta is making moves to make it even more difficult.

VRChat technically supports standalone operation, but the experience is incredibly limited. A lot of avatars and worlds are PC-only, and most of the ones which are crossplatform have severe limitations on standalone (no custom shaders, no custom audio, limited physics interactions, etc.). Plus, the way VRChat implements a few things makes some stuff just plain break when you have both PC and Quest users in the same room.

PC-based VR is a lot more expensive to get into, particularly because you need a decent GPU, and decent GPUs are still expensive. But it's very well worth it, and any of the standalone headsets worth using (namely Quest and Pico) can also be used with a PC. There's still some compromises, though. For example, Quest uses streaming rather than a direct video connection (even over USB), so there's always going to be some visible compression artifacting and a bit of input latency.

You also still have to contend with the Quest's battery life, and controller support is pretty limited. For example, you're stuck with the Quest's own controllers which have pretty crappy finger tracking, and the hand tracking doesn't work quite right with PC in my experience (and you're still very limited with what you can even do with it in VR anyway).

All in all, though, the Quest 2 has been a surprisingly decent PCVR device, and everything about the Quest 3 looks like it's an improvement on that.

Tracking and controllers

There's a few different tracking approaches in use, and all of them have tradeoffs. The two most common ones are inside-out tracking and lighthouse tracking. I can't say that I love either approach right now. (There's also a couple of others like the optical base-station tracking used by the original PSVR and Oculus Rift but there's a reason nobody makes headsets with that anymore. It sucks.)

Inside-out tracking has a bunch of strengths, for example:

It's self-contained and lightweight
No need to set up the room for it
Generally gives you at least a pretty okay passthrough camera (and depending on implementation this can be sufficient for mixed reality, but mostly it's nice to be able to quickly see where physical objects are around you and make sure your playspace boundaries are set appropriately and so on)

But it has a bunch of weaknesses too:

It can be extremely dependent on the lighting conditions of the room
Sometimes it can be a little jittery or run at a lower sampling rate (although most headsets seem to use an IMU to improve on this)
You can only track controllers that are in view of the cameras, which can be very bad for immersion
Also the controllers tend to be tied specifically to the headset and you're basically stuck with whatever your headset manufacturer directly supports
Playspace size can be pretty limited

Quest Pro (and Quest 2 with the pro controllers) fix the tracking visibility issues by adding extra inside-out processing to the controllers themselves, but then you run into issues like trying to keep their relative playspaces aligned and also now you need more processing power on everything, which makes stuff more expensive. Also I've heard that the Quest Pro controllers have severe input lag when used with a PC.

Lighthouse tracking is what's used by things like Vive, Index, Pimax, Bigscreen Beyond, etc. and it's pretty clever! It works by sweeping beams of infrared light across the room, and then small fast IR sensors in the devices use the delay between sensor hits to figure out their relative positions, which then lets it quickly triangulate their position and rotation. This technique has a few strengths:

Relatively inexpensive to implement on the device side
Extremely accurate and precise, with everything sharing a single playspace and calibration
Calibration is pretty straightforward, once you have the room set up
Wide variety of supported devices which you can mix-and-match via SteamVR (controllers, tracking pucks, etc.)

but also some pretty big weaknesses:

Requires a lot of room setup, often including drilling holes in the walls²
Extremely sensitive to reflective and refractive objects in the room like windows and framed artwork TV screens (imagine how hard it was to set up the VR lab at HBO when we moved to a new office with shiny glass walls!) or glass popcorn bowls
Can interfere with other IR devices in the room³
More moving parts (literally!)

Setting up the lighthouses in my living room was A Project.

What I'd like to see in the future is some sort of inside-out approach where you can set up a couple of IR beacons in the room which lets all of your devices register to the same playspace. Something like how the old Wii "sensor bar"⁴ worked, maybe.

I know some folks who have done a hybrid setup where they use a Quest 2 as the headset and then lighthouses + index controllers for better controller tracking but that's an absolute mess to set up and it seems like there's just so much that can go wrong with it, plus you still have all of the disadvantages of lighthouses and room setup.

Full-body tracking

Another thing to keep in mind (especially for VRChat) is full-body tracking. I don't have a full-body setup yet although I preordered a SlimeVR set which should be arriving in a few months (so much for January 2023, huh?).

I know a lot of folks who use lighthouse-based FBT (Vive/Tundra/etc.) and it seems to add a lot to their experience, but also adds a lot of frustration. It's also very expensive, and of course is limited to a lighthouse-based setup.

SlimeVR is IMU-based and works with basically everything, but it also has a somewhat more involved setup with a bunch of calibration stuff you have to do, and it's never going to be as precise or accurate as a lighthouse setup. But it's probably Good Enough™ for VRChat. Honestly, I find VRChat to be pretty immersive even with just head and hand tracking! (Having GoGo Loco on my avatar helps a lot though.)

There's a few other full-body tracking setups that people have done (April tags, Kinect2VR, Sony mocopi, etc.) but SlimeVR and lighthouse trackers seem to be the only two worth bothering with at this time.

Headsets worth considering

I keep an eye on the VR space, and here is my current knowledge of what devices are out there or coming soon that are worth considering. There's probably some that I missed, of course.

Quest 2

Pretty comfortable, and affordable. Available now, can be had pretty cheap. Uses inside-out tracking.

Decent FOV, okay optics, the controllers are okay but not great.

Works okay with PC VR, especially if you have good wifi. Could definitely be better.

Meta still supports it but they're not likely to for much longer after the Quest 3 comes out.

Quest Pro

I hear nothing but good things about this setup! Way better optics and controller tracking than Quest 2. Pro controllers supposedly have bad lag issues when used with PC though. Meta has discontinued this so expect limited support going forward.

Quest 3

By all accounts, this has even better optics and comfort than Quest Pro, but it's limited in terms of controller tracking. They're using a hybrid controller/hand-tracking setup which is very promising, but it remains to be seen how well this will work on a PC setup. It's probably worth waiting for, especially as a "my first headset" thing.

PSVR 2

I haven't used this myself but I hear it's a really good headset with really good controllers and one of the better inside-out tracking implementations out there. It's not officially supported on PC but there's some projects which are showing a lot of promise. Don't run out and buy one today, but maybe in a month or two it'll be usable on PC.

Valve Index

This one's getting a little long in the tooth but it's still pretty compelling. I haven't tried it myself but people I trust tell me that it has good optics and visual quality and is reasonably comfortable. It does require a lighthouse-based setup which is pretty formidable.

I do hear frequent concerns about reliability and durability, and apparently Valve can be kind of bad about long-term support.

The Index controllers are great and are 100% what I'd recommend for any lighthouse-based setup.

Bigscreen Beyond

This one's expensive ($1000 for the headset alone) but it's also extremely comfortable. According to early reviews it has amazing optics and displays. The FOV is limited (even smaller than Quest or Index) but the comfort more than make up for it, and the facial interface is custom to your face and gives really good immersion so apparently you don't even notice the limited FOV.

To use this you'll still need lighthouses and separate controllers.

I'm really tempted to buy one of these, if I ever get employed again.

Pimax Crystal 12k

If you're willing to compromise on comfort a little bit and have a really good GPU (like a 4080) and money is no object this is apparently a really nice headset, particularly for gaming.

This is definitely not the first headset to buy.

Summary

I think the ideal setup really depends on a lot of factors and what you want out of VR. If you want a top-tier PC VR experience and have a room that you can set up specifically for it, the Valve Index seems to be the way to go for now, or you can wait a bit and get a Bigscreen Beyond setup (which will cost around $600 more than an Index setup out of the gate).

If you want a bit more flexibility in your environment and prioritize comfort, Quest 3 is probably your best option.

So I guess the very short answer to your question is: "Yes."

Yes as in the cable TV network. We were investigating VR as a new way of telling stories, and the biggest project I worked on was a Westworld prequel that we showed at a bunch of film festivals. It won an Emmy! Sadly it's not available to the general public, but there's a smattering of articles about it, e.g. https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/hbo-created-its-own-westworld-vr-experience/ and https://vrscout.com/news/hbos-westworld-virtual-reality-debut/
There are alternate ways of mounting the lighthouses, such as placing them on furniture or using adhesive strips to stick them to the wall, but these can be pretty limited. In my experience, the vibration of the lighthouse's sweep motors ends up making the adhesive strips fail pretty quickly. But others have had better luck with this! It's very much YMMV.
My TV's remote control, for example.
The Wii sensor bar was not a sensor! Instead it was just a couple of IR LEDs with a known spacing between them. All the actual position sensing happened in the Wiimote itself, where there was a very simple IR camera that would look for two bright dots, and it'd use the positions of the dots to infer the Wiimote's position and orientation. It was very clever, but the "sensor bar" was in no way a sensor.

Lupi

@lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

Getting into VR