HTC Vive XR Elite Virtual Reality Headset + Controllers

Where do I start.... I really wanted to like this headset and I defended many of HTCs poor choices in designing this thing... But after using it, or trying to, I cant defend this POS. 1) They marketed this as the most comfortable headset on the market and it is NOT. Its actually pretty UNCOMFORTABLE. The eye guard is made out of a stiff material with ZERO padding and a rough fabric over it. It quickly irritates your face and digs into your skin and leaves marks and hurts to wear or move around in for any length of time. 2) The headset doesnt have access to the normal typical app library, instead it has a very unique and limited app library of about 20 apps. The web browser didnt even work at launch and they didnt even notice or bother to fix it until I put them on blast on Facebook. And its still buggy as hell. 3) You dont even have access to basic apps like YouTube, Netflix, Chrome, etc. 4) the only way to play any decent apps is by linking to a powerful pc, and the HTC link software is very buggy. 90% of the games/apps wont load properly or register the controllers. And keep in mind these are all apps that work perfectly fine with my HTC Vive, Rift S, and Quest 2 Headsets. 5) The battery drains stupid fast. You have maybe an hour of use in game, 90 minutes maybe if you are using light apps. 6) They bragged about how good their eye adjustments were, but no matter what I try I cant get a good clear visual, always some blur. By contracts my HTC Vive and Quest 2 both give me a crystal clear non-blurry image. 7) The hand tracking is hot garbage, it STRUGGLES to track hands and gets their position wrong just enough to make trying to use your hands uncomfortable and cumbersome. 8) The controller tracking is also pretty bad, it frequently loses track of them even in a brightly lit room and it tracks them too low...the pointer line feels like its coming out of 10 inches below where the tip is. Makes clicking on things awkward and clunky. This thing is a steaming pile of disappointment and feels like they rushed out an unfinished product, I am going to send it back and get a Meta Quest Pro, at least I know that one will work.

This device is peak HTC. Pure form with no function. I sincerely don’t understand who these high-end standalone headsets are made for. To me, these are like prototype cars: they look cool and include cutting edge technology, but have no business being sold to consumers because they have no practical purpose. I experienced three major issues that will never be fixed, regardless of what HTC claims: 1. This was not designed as a PCVR device. You cannot readily stream PC content with or without a USB cable. Wireless is awful and it’s the hardware/software, not me. Other wifi 6E streaming devices I’ve used have flawless streaming on my network. USB tether is not the fix either. Everything about it is tedious or broken. When you get it to work, the images are compressed, frame rate is 75hz instead of 90hz, and it randomly freezes. Some people are saying HTC can fix this with an update, but that is impossible because there’s actually a major issue built into the device: you can’t stream via USB and charge at the same time. That’s why they make a big deal about hot-swappable batteries, it’s because otherwise you can only use this for 2 hours at a time unless you’re in standalone/wireless mode and plug it into the wall. Some owners and even HTC suggests daisy-chaining a battery into the PC connection, which barely helped in my experience, and is a ludicrous thing to accept as a solution. How hard would it have been to design a two-pronged cable that can provide data and power from the PC? Instead you have to buy a cable they made for a different headset they released years ago. Just admit that the HTC XR Elite wasn’t designed for PCVR. Stop lying HTC. 2. The sunglasses mode is a scam. I don’t see how it’s not a scam. You cannot actually use it in sunglasses mode because the headset’s internal battery is minuscule. This is not just a PCVR issue, this applies however you use the device. The internal battery’s job is maintain minimal power during disconnects so the device doesn’t have to do a complete reboot. Therefore sunglasses mode doesn’t work without being plugged in so it begs the question: plugged into what with what exactly?? The battery with the 8inch cable they provide? And the battery then goes where? Should I be wearing a battery backpack? I might as well just strap the stupid battery to my head at that point. The only way it works is with the aforementioned daisy-chained battery method, which means buying cables and splitters that you may not have, making this device even more expensive to do something poorly that it should be doing perfectly and natively out of the box. What is the benefit of sunglasses mode when it comes with literal strings attached? Absolutely brainless design. 3. My final issue won’t apply to everyone but is an absolute guaranteed deal breaker for anyone it applies to. You cannot use glasses with these, which isn’t a secret, as they advertise built-in diopter adjustment. Alone, not being able to wear glasses isn’t necessarily a negative. However, some people wear glasses for reasons that a simple diopter adjustment isn’t going to fix. Good luck if you have mild or worse astigmatism or wear lenses for anything other than basic myopia. The fundamental problem for me personally is that corrective lenses are fractional but the diopter adjustment is just rotating the lens between 0 and 6 until your vision is less blurry. It doesn’t display what you have it set to and even worse, it doesn’t seem to actually go all the way to 6.00. My vision is -5.50 and -5.75 and it is still blurry. Not VR blurry, but “this isn’t my prescription blurry.” This was the nail in the coffin for me, doubly so for fear that if my vision ever gets worse, the XR Elite becomes completely unusable. At the end of the day, this is a product with no audience. HTC built a really cool device for no one. They packed it full of next gen VR features, but they didn’t ensure that any of them actually work and the sum of its parts is less than the whole. I honestly had the same exact experience with their first major headset released in 2015, it is wild that they’ve learned nothing. HTC has a terrible habit of designing products that sound amazing in theory, but they don’t care how they function in practice. HTC advertises PCVR but wireless streaming is extremely buggy at best and USB streaming requires you purchase a $100 cable and jerry-rig in a battery somehow … and it still won’t work that well. Sunglasses mode sounds, looks, and feels awesome, but literally doesn’t work without connecting a battery somehow which defeats the purpose. You don’t have to wear your glasses (and can’t), but the included solution isn’t sufficient to give a clear picture for a large minority of people. All-in-all, I can’t recommend this to anyone.

I got my unit today, and I have to say; ALL of my expectations were wrong. Im absolutely gobsmacked at how bad the experience is. Im coming from a Rift S; so I was under the, false, impression that no matter how bad this ended up being, itd be so far above the rift thatd Id be plenty happy to trudge through the early adopter tax and growing pains. I cant. The UI is so shoddy that after a couple hours using it I was overflowing with the desire to submit for a refund and buy a quest pro. I despise facebook, passionately; but Id rather get back into bed with them, than bytedance, and there are no other standalone wireless options to speak of. Here are a few of my takeaway Pros and Cons. PROS PCVR latency on Wifi 6 (5ghz) was actually really good. (see first Con in list below for more context) The first thing I did was, open Beatsaber and test out some E+ songs. The saber movement felt accurate and realtime, as compared to my typical displayport tethered setup. Screen quality is nice, but honestly not jaw-dropping or anything. I was expecting this to be a big upgrade, considering the Rift S is relatively low res and has Fresnel lenses, but it kind of felt equivalent/worse on the XRE, even after acclimating to the sweet spot. The unit itself is tiny, shockingly tiny. The compactness of it blew my mind, after holding it in my hands, Im convinced were only a few generations away from near sunglasses sizes of HMDs. I had NO ISSUES with setup, or with pairing for wireless PCVR, everything connected more or less immediately. The instructions were sometimes poorly worded, but mechanically, each step worked out as would be expected. **I did have to segregate my 2.4ghz network, because it was preferring it over my 5ghz when I was allowing the router to decide. The 2nd accessory USB-C port(beside the right eye lens) does support USC-C Audio, so when I plugged in my 3.5mm adapter, it worked instantly with no configuration or other steps. The port is deeply recessed though, so the majority of USB-C ends will probably not fit. I used the official adapter that Apple sells, it has very thin insulation on the cable end. The in-arm speakers are excellent, better than most would expect. I had no issues with stereo positioning while using them. Aside from privacy uses, I dont think Id have used my headphones for anything else. The unit is capable of functioning, in glasses mode, for a while on the 15W from a standard PC USB-C port. It does drain the internal battery, but that will depend entirely on your use case. The inability to get consistent tracking results seemed to constantly cause it to spin up into full power while searching for the controllers and landmarks. So its hard to say how long I would get away with it. Seemed like an hour or two would be possible with light-ish use. The full color pass-through was really nice. Had no problem walking around, fixing myself a drink, reorganizing things around the room, etc... Very nice. There was definitely some warping in the image, so someone who is focused on AR/MR might find it intolerable; but for the home user in a casual setting, it was super useful to get around and do stuff without taking off the headset. CONS Controller and Hand tracking is abysmal. Im shocked at how poorly this tracks in low-medium light settings. I can put on my Rift S, in a fully dark room, with only a TV offering indirect lighting, and it tracks extremely well. The XRE needs every light in the room on maximum brightness, or it will constantly lose tracking. This made playing high level Beatsaber almost impossible under normal lighting conditions. If I turn on all my lights I get passable tracking, otherwise the controllers would lose tracking during any quick motions. Even with all my lights on, it had a VERY hard time tracking movement on the outer edges of the play-space. This can be improved with software over time, because its clear the predictive algorithms facebook uses for the Rift S can outperform it on older hardware using the same type of camera+controller gyro setup. The screen glare/light bleed are annoying. The blurriness you get from Fresnel lenses is, in my estimation, equivalent to the lens glare on the XREs pancakes. Its not like Im not used to it on my Rift, but I really thought the pancake lenses would be a huge increase in clarity. I see these as essentially a 1:1 swap. The OS is terrible. It looks pretty, and the options I sought out were almost always where I expected them to be in their respective menus; however, the OS itself was rife with bugs. Swapping in and out of apps would cause inexplicable system hangs that would have bizarre compounding effects, like sporadically unpairing the controllers until I did a hard system reset. This would happen in standalone and PCVR, however, the issues were far more severe on PCVR and required frequent resets and reopening PC apps and steam VR in a just-so method to allow it to function without breaking. The ability to reorient yourself is treated like a one-time initial device setup, instead of something youd do constantly. This might just be an issue of how I use VR. Sometimes Im on my couch, or standing in my VR space, or sitting at my desk. In the Oculus software, I can just long-press my menu button in the home screen and Im instantly reoriented to my current facing. I probably do this half a dozen times in every VR session: whenever I move over in my chair, or lean back on the couch, or move over while standing for better positioning, etc... The XRE experience is terrible in this regard, it loses its relative position without warning or skews the home screen position to some nonsense location and direction, but its reset position option, in the one tap menu popup, rarely reorients true to your heading, and often tries to honor some absolute positioning it has decided on its own. Once you combine this with the repositioning of apps in steamvr, its compounded into a nightmare of rinse-repeat in both interfaces until the app youre running is finally aligned correctly. The boundary settings are extremely limiting and cant be disabled. This is one of the most damning things in my list. If you set a huge boundary to avoid being interrupted by it, youll be punished by the system relocating your displays all over the place. If you use stationary, youd better stay still. Your floor position may change sporadically if tracking is lost temporarily. Any deviations from the boundaries, in stationary or room-scale, seem to have a 50/50 chance of causing standalone apps to crash, or streaming to crash, or to cause a system hang that needs a hard reset. This is all ridiculous to me, because, while I dont need boundaries, anyone who does, would probably have an awful experience with it. When I set up my Rift S years ago, by the 2nd week Id turned off guardian completely, and Ive never gone back; but even when it was on, it never broke system operation. Hand tracking, technically works. Ive never had a hand tracking headset before, so I dont know if its this awful on other hardware too; but it seems like to function at the level of a gimmick. It seems to struggle tremendously with the changing shape of hands as they move or rotate; which strikes me as the sort of thing that would be first-in-line-things-to-resolve in a hand tracking system. Like the controllers, it requires as much light as possible, and its not usable in low-med light scenarios. The idea of taking the XRE anywhere without its controllers seems impossible to me. As others have mentioned; in the glasses mode, the arms will dig a hole into your head if your head is too large. It was pretty painful for me after ~40minutes, so if you decide to work through it, youll probably have to sort out secondary padding. Its not bad at all with the battery pack attached, it feels like a normal headset in that mode. The central fixed-foveated rendering is way more aggressive than Id have liked, it was very noticeable anytime I was in an environment with textured walls and especially for text, looking around with my eyes left delivered an unacceptable visual mess. I havent used wireless VR before, so maybe this is a limitation of the XR2 platform and not HTCs fault; but, if its on HTC, its a huge negative. I have the hardware and bandwidth to easily push 2-3x what the headset is asking for, Id have preferred user-control over the reduced peripheral quality. settings:200mpbs/ULTRA/DynamicOFF Overall, this was a huge let down for me. I was thrilled to finally divorce facebook, in regard to my VR experiences, but its just too soon for me. HTC can improve a lot of whats wrong with this headset through software, but based on just how rough it is right now, I think thatll be more than a year away...

The XR Elite is a wonderful product that is horrifically painful to wear. There are a lot of good things about it but ultimately the pain was what made me get rid of it. The optics are really, really good. Edge to edge its super clear. Even when the HMD jiggles around and loses centering everything is still clear. You can truly look with your eyes. In complete blackness you notice the screen isnt as black as it could be. When a high contrast object shows up in the darkness it will tend to glow a little bit. It doesnt look like light shafts but instead multiple instances in a line losing definition. They have individual Diopters as well but I left them both at zero. There is IPD Adjustment using a very coarse slider instead of the usual dial on other HMDs. Its kind of difficult to get it dialed in to the exact sub millimeter but the lenses are very forgiving so precision wasnt needed. The IPD adjustment did jiggle itself loose once when moving a lot in VR. The screens are pretty good minus the blackest of blacks, though coming from a Vive Pro 2 there isnt much difference. Resolution is dense and not much more could be stuffed in without the battery suffering. When used fully standalone the battery life is somewhere between bad to okay. For a quick XR adventure its no problem which is what I think HTC is aiming for, not multi-hour adventures into the mist. I dunno if it was atypical but without the rear battery cradle the HMD would power on for about a second then shut off. With the battery cradle fully charged it lasted a little under 2 hours. When plugged into a computer it would charge but the drain would be larger than the supply. From full it would last around 3 hours when plugged into a PC. The controllers battery life is a totally different story. They would drain passively over the week and every time I went to use them they would be zeroed out completely. They automatically wake up from the tiniest of movements and theyd randomly wake up in the middle of the night from a 2.0 earthquake or something. I eventually left them on the charger for days on end until they would be needed to circumvent their drain. When fully charged I think they are supposed to last 6 some hours. Other than the controllers battery lives there isnt much to say about them. They feel comfortable in the hand and the buttons are in logical places. The thumb stick is kind of hard to push down but thats really about it for the main controls. They are kind of hard to differentiate left from right from feel alone if you dont have pass through mode enabled. They tracked well enough for the games I played but it got a little annoying when they got out of tracking space like above the head. They would track for about one second using only gyro and accelerometer when out of visual range then theyd go rotation only, no position. One second is enough if youre just tapping your back or putting a hat on but anything further and its a mess. The HMDs self tracking is pretty good and it never really bugged out. In complete darkness it would complain but even some ambient lights like monitors it worked well enough. Pass through mode must have some crazy noise reduction because I can still make out shapes in darkness. Upon startup it asks to create a playspace that you draw on the ground. Usually thats just a room minus some furniture. If for any reason you completely leave that playspace while wearing the HMD, like in passthrough mode, it will completely lose the original playspace and ask you to create a new playspace. If you agree to make a new playspace itll kick you out of whatever content you were looking at to do the setup. To get around this you can probably just draw a playspace that includes every room you think youll be in. I really wish it was less dependent on defined playspaces than it currently is. The XR Elite is basically bound to one area, despite being standalone and portable. AR content is basically non existent on the XR Elite. Its primarily VR stuff with passthrough visuals in case you step out of bounds. There built in hand tracking which is cool but limited to only a gimmick because the entire UI is built like a VR interface. You dont reach out and touch any buttons or wave for gestures or anything like that. You vaguely point your wrist at a button then pinch your fingers to simulate a click. There is some content that uses the hand tracking a little better but not the home UI. There is an option to allow the hand tracking to pass through to SteamVR as a controller emulator. You can pinch your fingers to pull the trigger. You can also flip your right hand over and pinch to open the XR menu. Thats about it. The built in speakers are actually decent. The Quest 2 internal speakers arent quite as good and the PiMax 8KX strap speakers were a joke. Your ears are fully unobstructed so you can still hear your environment which is useful when activating passthrough. Youll notice an extreme lack of sub and bass through the speakers. They are fine for music like jazz and is particularly suited for human voices. If the environment outside the XR Elite is noisy things get progressively worse but thats the nature of off-ear solutions. For discussion between 10 some people I kept the volume at about 90% most of the time. The ergonomics SEEMED good at first but quickly devolved once positioned. The gasket around the face was really soft and pliant around the sides but at the top there is a plastic bridge that goes over the eyebrows. When using the battery cradle to crank down that plastic bridge gave me a headache after about an hour and I kept loosening the battery cradle until it just fell off. 100% of the tension is placed right on that forehead bridge. Since there is no top strap to keep the XR Elite elevated it only relies on squeezing around the head to stay up. The battery cradle side was comfortable but the effects at the front are unforgivable. There is also the alternate Glasses Mode which takes the battery cradle completely off and turns it into what looks like super techy glasses. The temples grab on ULTRA hard and the sides of my head were immediately aware of something trying to reduce the width of my skull. I wear medium-large motorcycle helmets and anyone with a wider head would be worse off. That being said, it was more comfortable than having my forehead be in pain though anything is more comfortable than being stabbed. There is a TINY amount of cushion in the temple ends that have about 1mm of squish. Problematically, it places all that squeeze on what feels like less than one square inch per side so you really feel it. Surprisingly even though there is no back strap to keep the XR Elite held on it manages to stay on my face, fully planted, through a bunch of action games I played. You might ask, how did I power the XR Elite without the battery cradle? You can use any power bank that outputs 12v like QC3.0/4.0 or variable voltage stuff. Generally, if it can charge a laptop it can definitely power the XR Elite. I put the power bank in my pocket and ran a 3 foot cable up to the cable holding pinch at the right temple and into the power slot. My power banks are decently large, two being 50wh and another at 100wh, and last way longer than the included battery cradle. You can also push the power banks through the battery cradle and get all the extra charge associated. With a quick charging power bank itll push the battery cradle to 100%. As soon as the power bank dies itll go back to using the battery cradles charge and in this time you can plug in another one or ride the remaining energy to the end. Additional note, the battery Cradle can be used for USB tethering. I thought it was just a charge port but it pushed data through just fine. I plugged it into a USB 3.2g2 port but Im not sure how fast the batter cradles port is, might be 3.2g1 or it might even be 2.0. The cabled port on the side of the XR Elite obviously has full USB capabilities but without a power source it wont do much. There is also an additional USB-C port to the right of the right eye and to the left of the temple thats hidden. I didnt manage to try that port out but I believe its a host port. Tethering is great on the XR Elite. Just install the app on both a PC and the XR Elite, make sure Wi-Fi is working OR the USB is tethered, and in the XR just click Streaming App. That kind of convenience made me really, really like the XR Elite. There was a few times when the Wi-Fi streaming would get a bit overcompressed possibly from environmental issues. Upping the SteamVR resolution had ZERO effect on visual quality since it must pass through the Streaming Hub compression in the end. Upping the resolution just made more pixels have to fit through the same bitrate through Wi-Fi which had negative effects scaling up. There seemed like some of the gradients would lose a bit of smoothness, especially in light greys to slightly darker greys, while using the Streaming Hub. The convenience factor was just too good though. Ultimately, the Wi-Fi on the XR Elite stopped working. That combined with the extremely painful mounting systems brought me to the final crossroad. I returned it.

the face cushion had no padding along the top, where it has hard plastic pressed up against your forehead. just from completing the setup i had a painful red spot

The only pro is that its lightweight. The controller are cheap plastic, the tracking is awesome, the screen is fun and hard to see even on its brightest setting, no exclusive games, no virtual desktop, laggy despite my wifi 6e, did I already mention the controllers that feel like they will fall apart at any second and also have terrible battery life? This takes three place of the pico 4 as the worst headset on the market (with psvr2 taking 3rd. I HATE meta, but the meta pro has great lenses and the sweet spot is enormous, this thing feels like taking a step back in time to a colorized virtual boy with better graphics but just as useless. Already requested a return. This is an embarrassment to HTC. If you buy, have no expectations..... And youll still be disappointed. These lenses are awful.

Pros: The Vive XR Elite has a great form factor. Its lightweight, balances well while youre wearing it. I like the feel of the controllers. Video passthrough is pretty good. Its good enough to walk around the room, pick up things, and you can read text on your monitor if you get close enough. Controller tracking and hand tracking is pretty good. I know some have mentioned that the audio is not that great. I think its fine for what I use this for. I havent tried other VR headsets to compare though. Cons: I wear reading glasses, and read that the Vive XR Elite has adjustable lenses, so you could dial in your prescription. I was surprised to see that the clearest setting for me was dialing it to zero. The focus wasnt that great, but dialing any higher made it worse. I have an astigmatism, so maybe thats the issue. So if you have an astigmatism, this headset isnt for you? Hopefully there are some options in the future that will fix this. The stand-alone game options are pretty limited. Looking for more in the future... Connecting to the PC went smoothly, but the wifi connection is terrible. I have a 6G wifi router and the connection settings says its got an excellent connection, yet the VIVE Streaming Hub constantly says its dropping frames. *** Update *** I noticed my headset was flipping back and forth between my 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks. I have disabled my 2.4 GHz network in my router and that has greatly improved the WiFi experience. Plus HTC has updated the software for the headset which also seems to have greatly improved things. WiFi is working very well now. FYI, I have a modern MSI gaming laptop with 32 Gigs of ram and an NVidia 3090ti. I play SuperHot, which is fun yet has very simplistic graphics. This game works for me about 20% of the time. Forget playing something like HalfLife: Alex. *** Update *** As I mentioned before since HTCs update and turning off the 2.4 GHz network things are much improved, including HalfLife: Alex. This game works great now even in WiFi. I tried using the headset with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. First with WiFi. It came through low resolution and was jerky. Then I played it wired in through the USB-C cable. It looked much better but alternated every second between normal frame rate and lagging, which made things like landing more difficult than it should have been. *** Update *** The HTC update seems to have greatly improved wired performance as well. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is amazing in VR. There are still cons though: Text in the cockpit is still fuzzy because I have an astigmatism and am unable to perfectly focus the headset. I tried Immersed, which is a vr desktop. The resolution and focusing issues Ive had make this unusable. This is my first VR headset, and I went by pre-release reviews of this headset, which can be risky, but I _thought_ HTC, with all their experience producing VR headsets, would come through on this one. I was very wrong. *** Update *** I am glad to say that HTCs software update fixes for both WiFi and wired and adjustments I made to my WiFi router have greatly improved performance. I have changed my rating from 1 star to 4.

Cons: 1. If your network isnt being broadcasted, theres no way to add to the hidden network from the Vive Manager app. So you have to join whatever broadcasting/visible network that you see then sign up the headset then go into the virtual dashboard to Connectivity to add the hidden network 2. Small sweet spot 3. Fan in headset is noticeable 4. Glare from the lenses and halo effect (or light bleeding) around the edges 5. IPD says 72 but only goes to 69.55 6. Grainy passthrough 7. First impressions of the hand tracking isnt that good. It works but you most definitely need the controllers nearby 8. Despite following the steps of this video, I have difficulties getting the headset to see the PC connection. After almost a hour of working on this, I gave up. I will try again tomorrow but Im more than likely returning the headset when I had high hopes for this as a glasses wearer and original HTC Vive owner. Pros: 1. Form factor: lightweight, compact, balanced 2. Good audio: crisp 3. No glasses needed

PROS - Built in speakers. They are simple but they do the job. I dont care too much about audio quality, so I cant speak for those who do. For me its good. - Form factor. Being able to lie back is a game changer for me. I love how compact and lightweight the device is. The design is great and it looks super cool and futuristic on your face if thats important to you. I really dont see myself going back to bigger headsets. - Diopters. Diopters worked well. I just adjusted each eye to my prescription and thats it. So nice not needing my glasses, but if you have a prescription higher than -6 (or have astigmatism), youre out of luck. - Passthrough. This is my first time experiencing passthrough in VR and I found it very useful being able to see my surroundings just by double tapping a button on the controller. The passthrough is not in 3D, but I think theres definitely something going on to simulate depth. Its a bit wonky at times. CONS - Software. Its basic and broken. The pre-installed apps crash, the brightness setting is completely non-working, hand tracking is simply too frustrating to use, the home environment will not boot up if your room is too dark, (but they make you figure that one out for yourself), most of the pre-order bonus apps are not yet available, and almost everything else is coming soon. For the price, I expected high quality software, but this is basically alpha pre-consumer software. Users shouldnt have to find complicated workarounds just to get basic features functioning. Sorry, but software should just work without effort. As far as apps go, there are very few, but I do keep seeing new ones pop up. Still no YouTube VR, Bigscreen, or really any of the other basic ones youd expect. - Fan Noise. The fan is loud, especially in passthrough mode. It almost makes me not want to use passthrough mode. - IPD slider. I expected a clean feeling slider, but the slider is gummy and hard to move. Its not a precise slider. - Gasket. The front gasket falls off too easily, but only if youre moving around a lot. If youre a stationary user, this wont be an issue. - Comfort. Wearing the headset with the battery cradle is not very comfortable for me. Luckily, glasses mode feels much better. - FOV. I would not say FOV is bad, but I was expecting better for the price. You definitely notice a binocular-like vision but considering the form factor, its acceptable. I cant speak for PCVR, but I havent heard good things sadly. Despite its issues, I still think this is a good headset for my use case and with better software, it could easily be a great headset. VIVE, if youre reading this... Show me how magical software can be. Software makes hardware great. You have to wow people. Dont ship boring broken software. I am excited for future updates.

Vive has produced yet another high-quality product! Once again HTC Vive is making headsets for recreational consumers. I originally had the Vive OG, and the Vive Pro OG with the lens mod. I bought the quest 2 just for travel and mobility. After hearing everybody’s complaints with the XR Elite, I was concerned this headset would not be a vast improvement in quality of play… Especially with PC-based games. A good example is the quest 2 running kayak mirage… it is horrible… no detailing or definition in any of the landscape/scenery whether playing standalone, or PCVR with a cable! And I was concerned that without the video compression of the Vive pro that the XR Elite headset running off USB-C would not be good. I was completely surprised! Very pleasantly surprised!!! I’ve been using VR since the inception of consumer headsets, and this is a nice step up! The pancake lenses make all the difference and it is so much better than the quest 2!!! So much clearer, great definition in images. and the diopters are the icing on the cake! I wear contacts and as part of the set up process you have the option to adjust the diopters. I decided to adjust the diopters just for the experience and wow! So now one eye is set on 2 1/2 and everything looks pristinely clear!!! My vision is fine in all other scenarios, and now I’m glad to be able to see better in VR too. I’ve heard complaints of God rays, fix your diopters! Also, using the cable link, I was able to run Lone Echo flawlessly! I could never get the quest to run it, and when I did. It literally dropped more frames than it played and of course it just looked ugly. Even with a high-quality hardwired cable link. Lone Echo is also a program that doesn’t look great with the screen door effect… So I didn’t want to play it with my Vive Pro either. It looks glorious and runs so smoothly it’s insane with the XR Elite!!! Haven’t run half life Alex yet, but I’m sure it’s going to play as well as lone echo does, if not better! I have been thrilled to see that the headset runs all my old programs in steam, as well as revive! Sweet! Before getting the XR elite, I was using two headsets, my Vive Pro for at home on PCVR, and the quest 2 for mobility around the house, and when I travel using it as a standalone headset. The Vive XR elite is a step up in all directions! It is extremely comfortable, no mods needed like you have to do with the quest 2, (ouch!), and I can’t get over the clarity!!! I can use it anywhere in the house as stand alone, or run it with wireless streaming without sacrificing quality. Because it can run as a standalone, it makes it perfect for traveling… Especially with its low profile and lightweight! The XR Elite definitely meet my needs, and exceeds expectations. I did not have a headset that I could run wirelessly with higher quality PCVR. Absolutely love it! So exciting! Now, like all things in VR, the software is a little bit slow in coming. Patience wins here. Software will be coming, and I’m ready for it. I remember in 2016 trying to find software… There’s a plethora available now in comparison to that!!! Lol.