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Our family has an Oculus Quest 2, and it's not tethered (unless you want to pair with a computer that way, which I'm told shaves off a few milliseconds of latency vs WiFi 6?), not excessively heavy for adults and teens, not disorienting, renders text readably even with small fonts at a distance, and doesn't give my motion-sickness-prone wife problems as long as she keeps her sessions under an hour. I find it sweaty, because I almost exclusively use it for exercise games, but in the few cases where I play something else it's fine. I can definitely see room for resolution/framerate/latency upgrades, but we're nearing the 5 year anniversary of "eh, good enough".
All that said, I don't use it very often recently, solely because of software issues. If it takes 20 seconds to start up the OS, another 20 seconds to convince the thing that I've cleared enough open space to play in safely, another 20 seconds to switch from my wife's account to mine, another 20 seconds to start up the game I want to play, another 20 seconds to load up the level I want ... man, I only had 15 minutes of free time in between work and dinner today, I'm going to need 5 of that to cool down, and I've just burned 15% of the rest staring at one loading icon or another. It's so much easier to go to the treadmill or piano if I'm feeling like self-improvement or to the Steam Deck (roughly 2 seconds from hitting the power button to being ready to unpause my game in progress) if not. And the 20×N tedium is for a game that's in the Oculus walled garden! Getting the thing to pair properly with Steam on another computer is so much more tedious that I've barely even tried out Half Life: Alyx, despite that being a bucket-list-tier game for me.
Man, the quest 3 is a huge improvement then - I got one for Christmas and I just experimented and booted it and my steam deck up at the same time, and it was just finished loading the steam deck when passthrough and the internet connected on the quest 3.
If you want to play half life alyx though, you need the tether. If your WiFi is good the latency won't be a huge difference, but getting it connected is so much simpler it should be criminal somehow to not package them together. With the tether literally all I have to do is start steam vr, then connect the tether, and it figures itself out. If I want to try a different steam account I just unplug and reboot and start again.
Do you have any recommendations though, while I'm at it? I've been loving the shit out of Maestro and my brother gave me this cool game that feels a bit like half life meets bioshock called Genotype, but I want to try some of the exercise games and I don't even know what I should be looking for there.
For exercise, Beatsaber and its clones are the go-to, but I've also found Rumble (Avatar Earthbending contest) pretty fun if you don't mind pvp.
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Doing a double-take at the first part of your comment ... maybe it's possible that the quest 3 isn't a huge improvement, but rather the Steam Deck is? I was using Steam from a laptop when experimenting with the quest 2, and I confess it didn't even occur to me to try VR via the Steam Deck after we got the Steam Deck. Will any USB-C to USB-C cable work for the tether if I want to give that a try?
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Beat Saber seems to be the most popular, and I definitely had fun with it. I prefer Supernatural, but that does have a recurring fee.
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Come on, that's a 2K display stretching its pixels across a 100°+ field of view. At that point, you can't even read instruments in flight simulators or racing sims, not to speak of productively interacting with text. And it turns out that even a lot of tpyes of doom-scrolling heavily rely on text interaction.
Those headsets will get competitive for a lot of tasks when they get to the level of a cheap office monitor 3' away from your face, and that's around an order of magnitude more pixels (per line, two orders more pixels in total). The Vision Pro has 2x the pixels per line, uses tricks to increase pixel density where it matters, and is still far away from looking at a shitty full HD display.
I hate interacting with people or real objects while wearing one of those. To make this go away, you need transparent displays or really good pass-through mode. The latter is less than ideal, because turns out most other people really hate talking to someone wearing a headset - no matter if you paint a face onto it or not.
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Use Virtual Desktop. I found it basically works out of the box.
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