My collection of many (VR) things
or, take a shot every time Penn promotes her youtube channel or says the phrase "good deal"
I own quite a lot of VR hardware
HMDs (oldest to newest)
Dell Visor Windows Mixed Reality Headset - Early 2019
I cover a lot of my history with this in my giant beat saber retrospective, but I was definitely being way too kind on it bc of my rose-tinted memories with the thing. Having looked at it again recently, it sucks, at least by today's standards. The controllers refused to hold a battery and were pretty uncomfortable (not to mention really outdated by now), the headset itself feels pretty cheap and just worse than the vive. But, it was one of the first budget VR headsets (£280 back in 2018, that was almost 3 times cheaper than a vive!) and at the time was everything I wanted it to be. Lots of beat saber (and a little bit of superhot and VRChat) was played on it before I eventually realised I needed an upgrade.
HTC Vive Pre - Feburary 2024
Yes it really took me 5 years to finally ditch my windows mixed reality headset. I was initially looking around for used Quest headsets as I was looking into entering the world of VRChat, but I saw a really good deal on this (get used to hearing that) on FB marketplace and had to get it (£50 for a full vive kit? ppl will pay that for a single base station!). It was a decent leap in quality from my WMR headset, despite being a few years older. The controllers were more reliable (although I did miss the joysticks), the colour and general feel of the headset was way better (even if the resolution/screen-door-effect was worse) and it was also the first time I got to truly experience VR Fullbody Tracking! (by using more Vive wands converted to work like vive trackers and strapped to a pair of crocs, it actually works really well!). Despite my new headset, I kept looking around online just in case I found a better deal, and it wouldn't take me that long to do so...
Pico 4e - April 2024
This has been my main headset ever since I got it, for VRChat it is still my favourite, even if it has some issues. I actually did a whole video talking about this, but tl;dr is:
The eyetracking is pretty decent and the facetracking is pretty meh, it only works with VRChat which kinda sucks but isn't a huge deal, for £400 it's a moderately okay deal but for £140 it was a steal
Pico 4 - May 2024
Mostly got this for the controllers (see the video I did on the 4e), but it was pretty fun seeing Pico's consumer software. I'd generally recommend this to people interested in VRChat over the quest headsets (cheaper HMD, the option for cheap FBT, no meta) but the lack of games support does suck.
Quest 2 - September 2024
Got this right before cheap used quest 2s had truly saturated the market, got an alright deal (£150 all-told, not bad for the time but not great in hindsight) but this one stunk pretty badly and was also thrashed when I got it. I was able to clean it up fine but the stick-drift was pretty bad. Bought this for my partner at the time, but also played around with it a bit myself. Meta's software was definitely interesting to play around with (shoutouts to the surprisingly good hand tracking!) but ultimately unneeded, this is likely to be the first I sell.
Meta Quest 3 - November 2024
Got an insane deal on this (truth be told I probably wouldn't have bought it at MSRP, especially since I already had the Pico headsets), but for £190 a lot can be forgiven. This has served me well for regular VR games, as well as teasing me with the possibility of using hand tracking in VRChat. I was having a bit of pain with the stock headstrap so I got the BoboVR battery strap, yeah not a huge fan. It just gets the back of my head at a really weird angle to the point where I feel like I may have been more comfortable with the stock strap (that's probably hyperbole but take it as you will), the battery is nice to have but for gaming I only use it for 30 minut4e sessions, I would've probably been better off getting a similar battery setup for my Pico 4e that I use for VRC (although 2 hours is about where I need to take a break anyway)
HTC Vive Pro - January 2025
Got a good deal on this (£70 for the headset and linkbox, albeit in rough condition). I was able to clean it up enough to get rid of the bad smells but it still feels quite creaky and the audio is really iffy on it, works great for racing sims and looks very pretty in VRChat, but I miss my eyetracking too much to use it for that.
Other hardware
Pico motion trackers
If you know me in VRC then you know I won't shut up about these things, they're worse than almost any other option but they're also cheaper than almost any other option, I also did a video talking about these!
Pimax Sword Controller
Yes, just the one controller. I saw somebody on ebay selling a broken one for £25 and decided to snatch it up since I hadn't seen anyone else talking about them. In short, not very good for almost anything except beat saber and mine doesn't even work most of the time, but it made for a fun topic for a video
