Top 11 Best VR Headsets to Buy Online 2020

Tony has been interested in tech since he was very small. In 2014, he co-founded Immotionar, a VR startup aimed at bringing the entire human body into the virtual world (instead of just your hands and head).

He currently pens the blog The Ghost Howls, where he talks virtual reality, augmented reality, and startups. He's also active on social media, where he talks tech and business, sometimes seriously, sometimes jokingly, but always with a lot of passion.

The best VR there is now is the one for PC. It's continually updated, and the graphics card are continually updated. We also know, for instance, there are upcoming headsets like the Pimax, which have enormous resolution and enormous field of view.

And, regarding the tethered headsets, they can offer a world with better-looking graphics. While, on a standalone like the Focus or the Quest, this is impossible. If you render a huge number of polygons, you'll have something like one frame per second and you’ll probably vomit in 30 seconds of gaming. So it depends on the power of the device—this is the real problem of standalones.

The problem is in the controllers. The tracking of the things that you hold in your hands is mediocre. I tried PSVR at the Gamescom exhibition some days ago, and I continuously saw, in VR, my hands going everywhere. So it’s not reliable in that sense because it uses PS Move, which is an old technology.

Someone told me, for instance, that if it’s Christmas and you have a Christmas tree behind you while you play with the PSVR, the tracking goes completely crazy. So there are some problems. Otherwise, the experience is worse than PC but good anyway. And this is the reason why PSVR is selling very well.

The advantage of cardboards is that you pay very little money, and the experience can work with almost any mobile phone, provided that it has at least Android 4.4. And the phone must feature gyroscopes because if it has no gyroscopes, then it can’t detect that you’re rotating it. The problem is that the quality is low; it’s very low.

However, not all cardboards are equal. I have a cardboard here that I bought for maybe $20 on Amazon, and it’s terrible. It has terrible lenses; the cardboard is very uncomfortable and such. But, when I went to a friend’s company, I tried the cardboard that they bought, and the optics were good and the comfort was so-so. It depends a lot on the manufacturer.

On the other side of the spectrum, there's high-quality headsets the Samsung Gear VR. They provide high-quality VR with great visuals, with comfort, and all the rest. Of course, you’re fixed; you can only rotate your head, but at least you have a good experience. The problem is they cost a bit more, especially because you need a high-quality phone. But, the difference is noticeable.

The problem with standalones is that they’re mobile devices, so they can’t provide high-quality VR. On PC I can play awesome games with fantastic graphics; on mobile devices, the game maybe is inside a room so there are few things that it has to render. And they’ve just been launched, so there are some ecosystems like VIVEPORT that have few applications that are enjoyable.

But maybe you've seen that, some months ago, I interviewed Mr. Alvin Wang Graylin, the regional president in China of Vive. And he said a very interesting thing to me. He said, “In my opinion, the standalone is the one that will go to the masses. While the tethered headsets—the premium experiences— will be for enterprises or for gaming.”

He made the comparison with cars. He said the standalones are like the Sedan—the kind of cars that everyone has. And the gaming, tethered headsets are BMWs, Mercedes, Porsche—these kind of high-quality cars for people who want more performance.

There are lots of factors to be considered when talking about graphics. For instance, there's the resolution, and there's how the pixels are arranged. On the Focus, you have an OLED display with an arrangement that’s like a honeycomb. On the Oculus Go, you have a perfect grid. So the problem is that, on the Oculus Go, you notice more of the pixels’ edges because you can really see that grid.

What's important is that you don’t see the pixels, and, with current headsets, this isn't possible. The only one that claims such a rich resolution is a headset called the Varjo. Varjo is a company that makes enterprise headsets. And they feature something like human eye resolution, so you shouldn’t see the pixels when you put the headset on. But its cost will be in the $5,000 - $10,000 range.

So the aim is reaching that level of quality, but, at the moment, with the average consumer headset, it's not possible. The more resolution you have, the better—the visuals are better, it is more credible, and such.

Personally, I don’t notice much difference in refresh rates—as long as it stays above 60. I know people that are more sensitive will notice more difference, experience more motion sickness, and such.

However, if you go below 60, I will notice that as well. For instance, if you go to 30, you’d start to see lag; you turn your head, and the display lags in responding to your movements, to what you do, and so becomes really unpleasant.

I think that that the minimum to have a good VR experience is 60Hz, 60 frames per second. And the current standard is around 90Hz. And the future—what we’re shooting for is 120Hz.

The problem is that all the VR headsets we’ve had lately have very similar field of view—maybe 10° more or 10° less, but no big evolution. There are some enterprise headsets like the Pimax or the StarVR One, which feature a bigger field of view of like 180, 200°. And it is a mind-blowing experience because it is not like seeing through binoculars anymore.

And there's also this little thing that few know about—a bigger field of view means also more motion sickness. So it's a little drawback of having a bigger field of view. But, anyway, it's what we want to have.

I noticed how field of view is important when trying HoloLens, which is an augmented reality headset. A little field of view of like 30° really breaks the magic—you don’t have the illusion anymore. You just have a tiny window where you have the mixed, the augmented reality, whatever.

I ran some tests here in the office with the Vive Focus and the Lenovo Mirage Solo. I moved in a little yard continually for like 25 meters back and forth to see if the tracking was stable enough. And it was great to see that the Lenovo Mirage Solo with the Google WorldSense technology had fantastic tracking; I could move and it would continually track me. It lost nothing.

It was fantastic because I could move and see everything moving smoothly around me. You get a sense of freedom when you have untethered VR with room-scale tracking.

I think that currently Oculus is doing the greatest job in creating good content. They fund lots of games on the platform. One of the best games for VR, in my opinion, is Robo Recall. It's a game Oculus has funded, giving millions of dollars to Epic Games. And this shooter has been made perfectly by Epic to fit the VR ecosystem, so the interface, the virtual world, everything—it’s perfect for VR.

After Oculus, we have Steam. There are lots of Steam VR games that are great. Steam is the best place to find games for PC, and even for VR, it is the same. The VIVEPORT is lagging behind a bit because it is a new ecosystem, so it has few high quality games at the moment.

PlayStation is another topic; it has its own walled garden. I don't love PSVR, but I know that it is a great console and a good ecosystem for gaming because it is a console. So it has some exclusive titles like Resident Evil that everyone is vying for.

Out of controllers that are out at the moment for consumer headsets, I think that the best are the Oculus ones. I like the Touch because it can provide some kind of hand emulation. But it is not perfect at all. You can move only some fingers in some fixed state, so it is not as using your true hand.

But it’s better, for instance, than the Vive controllers that are very big and can be used only as a magic stick and not as a true hand. But Valve is developing these controllers called the Knuckles that will substitute for the current Vive ones.

And these Knuckles are very interesting because the hand emulation will be better than Oculus Touch and let you, for instance, squeeze objects in VR. It also lets you completely open your hands. So, for instance, you can, in VR, take a ball and then launch it in a very natural way. We are all waiting for these new controllers because, in my opinion, they will take VR another step further.

There are a lot of new applications that can mix the real world with the virtual world or can change the real world. I shared some videos on Youtube on some experiments with the Vive Focus. For instance, I changed the world that I see, giving it a Matrix-like look. This can be useful for the arts, showing you the world in a different way.

I don’t know if you remember this song from the 80s—“Take on Me” by a-ha. In the music video, part of the world is drawn by pencil and the other part is the real world, so there is this kind of portal, this kind of window that takes you continuously from the real world into this drawn world.

And someone made a demo for an AR kit that was something similar. So these are the kinds of fancy effects that you can have with headsets.