Former Oculus CTO Reviews Bigscreen Beyond: “like a prop for a futuristic movie”

I disagree that the QPro was wrongly placed as a business HMD: The QPro was indeed never designed for gamers. The included features make production costs way too high, and most of them do not address the issues gamers want to be solved first. Which is why gamers don’t buy it, even after the price has been dropped by 1/3rd.

The main benefits are the pancake lenses, then, depending on personal preference, the better balanced halo strap or the improved display, with everything else nice to haves, but not at that price. What gamers wanted/needed from Meta was basically a Pico 4 with slightly improved specs for USD 200-300 more than a Q2. Self-tracking controllers or charging stations are nice, but not USD 1000 extra nice, while the minimal hassle these allow for quickly jumping in and out of VR for short conferences would have made much more sense for businesses, as would eye and face tracking.

I fully agree that the lack of software was the real mistake: Much of the QPro hardware design would actually make it a good fit for the official target group, for whom the feature list and consequently significantly higher cost should have been fine. Meta just utterly fucked up the software, by not integrating it with existing PC software and workflows, by not developing a range of VR apps interesting for businesses, and by messing up the VR conferencing that was supposed to be the flagship use case so badly that not even their own employees are willing to use it.

In its current state the QPro does not provide an acceptable cost/benefit for either gamers (price too high) or businesses (benefit too low). Of course there will be some gamers willing to pay the price and some businesses that find their own uses cases, but in general the QPro was simply not ready for release. They probably should have worked at least an extra year or two on making it actually useful. But they apparently developed hardware and software independently, and ended up with hardware that had to be launched a year before the Q3 to not be outdated right from the start, so they pushed into the market anyway.

It simply should not have been released in that state. Trying to shift the focus to gaming afterwards made little sense with the expensive non-gaming features and the Q3 offering way better performance just a year later at 33% the initial or 50% the current QPro price. They should have scrapped it when it became clear that the software didn’t work, updated the hardware based on the Quest 3 and tried again in 2024 with actually working software. And they should have had working prototypes that demonstrate actual benefit for business usage long before they even started to design the QPro hardware.

They very prematurely tried to enter the professional VR market, be it either to get rid of HTC/Varjo, preemptively strike against whatever Apple might release, or just get into a market with higher margins, as consumer VR turned out to be less popular and more expensive than they had hoped. Making it mostly a disastrous management failure and consequently a giant market flop that Meta doesn’t want to talk about anymore. They probably feared that not launching an already announced product would look bad. But by launching it in this unfinished way, quickly cutting the price due to nobody buying it and then canceling it shortly after, they have pretty much kicked themselves out of the professional market, which values reliability and actual productivity gains way higher than price or fancy new features, for years to come. I’m sure HTC and Varjo love what Meta has achieved with the Quest Pro: bring lots of attention to professional VR, and at the same time make clear to buy professional HMDs from anybody but Meta.

oh.. too expensive…

now with 1000US$

the Quest3 – which is said to be for gamers:
its not difficult to get to the same price with the QUest3

Meta Quest3 512GB + Elite Battery STrap + Charging-Dock ==> 1000 Euro

of course: thats a unfair Äpfel-Birnen-Vergleich,
because of added battery runtime, …
but what i wana say is: there will be many gamers, which end up investing 1000Euro or more in the Quest3

i have the same concerns as you mentioned in your first paragraph …
the thing is “Strapped” to your face

I mentioned the Bigscreen Beyond in the first paragraph esp. as a proof that the strap or strapping something against the face is NOT the actual problem. So I don’t have the “same concerns”, quite the opposite. You sort of ignored my core argument: the problem is the uneven pressure, not the total pressure caused by weight and the tight strap. The point of a perfect fit is to distribute the weight/pressure evenly over a large area instead of causing uncomfortable pressure at some points.

All the examples you mention (ski goggles, Quest 2, drone FPV goggles) are examples of one-size-fits all, slim-padded-ring-against-face, which leads to exactly those pressure points, if the shape of the ring doesn’t match the shape of the face. And if they don’t sit perfectly on the face, they have to be strapped on tight to not slip, increasing the pressure.

I of course don’t know if exact fit would be the solution, as I haven’t tried the Beyond myself, and none of the commercially available interfaces match my face. But there are a lot of hints. The most important is that there is an astonishing amount of people who consider the Quest 2 with default strap very comfortable or can wear drone FPV googles for hours without problems, with a significant amount of people (you and me included) having very different experiences. It’s very unlikely that one of the groups has any special medical conditions causing this, the main difference between them would be the shapes of their faces/heads.

The second hint is the reports of Beyond users. Tested recently posted another review video, and pretty early on Norm says that he doesn’t even feel the HMD on his face, and that he can use it with a rather loose strap due to the HMD resting on the face. Indicating that a) the pressure the HMD puts on the face is very evenly distributed and b) that large surface contact can carry most of the weight, so the purpose of the strap is no longer to stop the HMD from sliding down, it mostly has to keep the HMD from flying off during head movements. The latter would still be a challenge with an 800g HMD.

I do no doubt your own experiences and that a counter balance is by far the best solution you have found. What that actually does is moving the pressure away from the face to the top of the head. It is of course possible that the top of the head is less sensitive than the face, but it is more likely that it is simply easier to evenly distribute the pressure there due to the much simpler convex shape, compared to a facial interface that has to match eye sockets, cheek bones, nose and eye brow area.

The only way to actually determine how big the impact of good fit plus large surface contact would be compared to better balance/lower weight, would be to actually try a device that would sit tight on the face even without any padding. From your list of uncomfortable things strapped against your face I’d say it is safe to assume that your facial bone structure is quite different from the average shape that HMD or ski google manufacturers expect, resulting in a rather bad fit for pretty much everything. With most masks/goggles/HMDs designed for a “standard head shape”, the currently only options to test this is with either the Bigscreen Beyond or a DIY solution.

And that’s actually my third hint. For me commercial HMDs range from “unbearable” to “somewhat tolerable for more than an hour”, none of them is in any way comfortable. But I had a very comfortable “HMD” once: a self-build Google Cardboard made from old packaging with some simple straps. It started out as absolutely unbearable for more than a few seconds, pressing all the weight against the bridge of the nose. But due to being made out of cardboard and foam, I could easily modify change the fit. I ended up with extra, 3cm wide stripes of cardboard covering the edges, with velcro attached foam and three straps over the back of my head, trimmed with scissors until there were no more unpleasant points of pressure.

So I got a very good fit for my face with a large surface area and straps exactly matching the shape of my head. The whole construction weight around 200g including the phone, so it was light too, but as mentioned, it started as unbearable despite the low weight. There wasn’t a lot of software that would have justified wearing it for hours, but I voluntarily played >1h sessions in 4Rooms and The Height, with the phone and software being the much bigger comfort issue.

I own a 3D printer and a CNC router, and one of my many still unrealized projects is to create a custom facial interface from a 3D scan, with the foam carved out of a large block and then placed on a printed ring fitting the Quest 2. I doubt that I would get anywhere close to the comfort of a Beyond, and Bigscreen will have good reasons why they dropped all non-essential features to reduce the weight. Based on my cardboard experience, I expect that I could get rid of high pressure points that make HMDs so uncomfortable for me, even with power banks strapped to the back as a DIY counter balance. But until I have actually tried it, this is as untested as your assumption that a properly balanced HMD is more important/impactful than a fitting facial interface and well worth the extra total weight.

I’m not sure what weight reducing modifications to loosen the strap by Bradley you are referring to. He initially added a side-to-side strap on top, not due to the HMDs weight, but because the default strap going around the head was uncomfortably rubbing against his ears, something adding a top strap solved by allowing to move the strap away from the ears. In the next video he reported that Bigscreen would now add such a top strap, so the HMD could be worn without the strap even touching the ears. The last modifications he showed were pretty much the opposite of weight reductions. In one he tried to add cat ears, and during the recent “Live Q&A (Summer is Hell Edition”), he showed a prototype by Val’s Virtual that replaces the strap with a fixed headband plus a rather heavy flip-up mechanism in the front, obviously not to reduce weight, but to add a functionality that made it more front heavy.

There will obviously never be one perfect solution for everything. While most are annoyed by light bleeding, there are others that really dislike being completely isolated and prefer facepads leaving gaps or “floating HMD” solutions like with the Quest Pro. Some have issues with balance when not seeing the floor, making wearing a Bigscreen actually dangerous. There will also be sensitivities about things touching the face. I personally hate anything even slightly touching the sides of my nose, so a Beyond may turn out to be unpleasant to wear, I’d need a facial gasket that leaves an extra air gap around the nose. And I’d absolutely love a flip-up HMD for development, and would give up low weight, zero light bleeding and high comfort in an instant for that.

I’m not claiming that custom fitted facial interfaces are the only option needed or will even work for everybody or every headset, though with the positive Beyond reviews and Apple doing something similar on the much heavier AVP, I expect others to follow. Adding a top strap will still distribute the weight better, it may just be unnecessary for comfort, just like adding a fourth or fifth strap on current HMDs doesn’t improve them noticeably. But you seem to assume that, based on your experiences with other headsets, a custom fit facepad just couldn’t solve all/most/enough of (your) comfort issues, or stay on the face without requiring lots of pressure, otherwise you’d not suggest adding a halo. And that despite reviewers saying they don’t even notice the HMD on their face during usage, thanks to the combination of low weight, large contact surface and a loosely worn strap, so adding a halo would make it worse for anything other than special cases like flip-up solutions, needing to always see the environment etc.

You may be right and it may not work for you. But you simply can’t know or even guess that at this point. The Beyond isn’t directly comparable to the HMDs we had so far, so it makes little sense to just project their problems onto the Beyond without trying it yourself it, or getting the answers from someone who has tried it. Since Bigscreen has now begun shipping the Beyond to customers, we should see a flood of reviews soon and hopefully get a better idea for how many of the users it actually works.