What VR headset should you buy?

In my last article, I explained how to decide if you have to buy a virtual reality headset. In this new one, I’ll try to explain you which one you should buy, depending on what you want to do.

CAUTION: before reading this article, you must be aware that virtual reality is becoming full of fanboysm, so expressing the wrong opinion about a virtual reality headset to your friends (like saying “Oculus Rift is great” to a Vive owner) can make them kill you with a shotgun or, even worse, can be the beginning of WWIII. So, use the contents of this article at your own risk.

Every day, new VR headsets come to the light. In this article, I’ll just review the most known ones, i.e.: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR, OSVR, Gear VR, Google Cardboard.

What is VRidge and how to use it

Today I tried VRidge. VRidge is a cool software that lets you use your Cardboard to play virtual reality PC games for Oculus and Vive. The premises were just too awesome that I had to try it, so I spent some time trying to figure out how it works. VRidge just installs DLLs, drivers and stuff, so that when you launch your PC virtual reality game, it thinks that the required headset is attached. Instead, the service just streams all sensors data (gyroscopes and stuff) from the phone to the PC game and all visuals data (the images to show to the user) from the PC game to the phone screen.

AltspaceVR: first impressions

Hello everyone! Friday we spent the whole day doing trials of our new virtual reality game. After a whole day of work, every normal person would have gone home, but since I’m a nerd and not a normal person, I felt the need to try AltspaceVR.

But… what is AltspaceVR? It’s a new virtual reality social platform… some kind of Second life. In AltspaceVR you can meet other people, organize and attend events (like watching a football match all together with other people, or making interviews with people, like the head of Leap Motion) and do other kind of activities. Lots of different inputs are supported (mouse+keyboard, but also Leap Motion, Kinect, etc…), as well as different headsets (Oculus, GearVR, etc…). They got lots of attention from the virtual reality ecosystem and with that, shitload of investment money (eeh, I’m such envious…)

Should you buy a VR headset?

Some months ago I started being part of the reddit virtual reality communities, like /r/virtualreality, /r/oculus and /r/osvr. This communities are really great (if you’re not part of them… what are you waiting for? Subscribe!), but sometimes there are questions that are just repeated one bazillion times: if I had one dollar for each time I answered them, I’d be the king of the world.

One of this recurring question is “Should I buy a VR headset?”, so I’m writing this post just to give you an answer from my perspective once for all (and so at the next time I’ll see this question on reddit, I could just type a link to this post… much easier). I’ll give you answers to other common questions in the next posts.

Let’s start : do you have to buy a VR headset?

The answer is… it depends. And with this answer full of wisdom, the article ends here, thanks for reading…