The Oculus Meta Quest 2 for work and play

I bought an Oculus Quest 2 a couple of months back. It’s time to discuss whether that was a good idea in terms of productivity and entertainment. Basically, is it worth it?

The original justification for buying the Oculus

I had read quite a few articles about working in VR – such as this one in Wired. This seemed like the perfect solution for someone who writes online for a living and lives in the middle of a loud city. Whack on a headset and you are in a room on a space station or log cabin in the mountains. Both of which are my ideal places to write. There are other options available.

Once you’re settled, you call up your virtual monitors. Depending on the program used, this could be multiple screens, all adjusted to perfection. I imagined myself with a writing screen, a couple of research screens, making a YouTube or Spotify screen for tunes, and another showing my share portfolio. (Actually, maybe not the latter, it is depressing as fuck right now.)

So I got the Oculus with dreams of unparalleled productivity. It didn’t really work as planned. I wrote about using Immersed on my other site. You can read more about it here.

In a brief summary though – the resolution wasn’t quite there. It may well have been my fault and I set it up wrong but when I raised the resolution too high, it lagged or didn’t quite look right. I seemed to be squinting too much. The concept itself is superb, however, and I felt like it was just a few tweaks and/or updates until it was viable. So, I am not ruling it out as a productivity powerhouse at some point down the virtual road.

Experiences, education, and entertainment

This is where things get good.

I started checking out experiences. YouTube videos were the first thing I tried. I had done these before on Playstation VR and they were a lot of fun. Skydiving, diving, being onstage at virtual concerts, and so forth.

I tried Brink, a kind of travel experience that was incredible. Next was Wander, which as far as I can tell is fully immersive Google Streetview – and, consequently, is as fun as you’d imagine depending on how much you would enjoy that. (I loved it.) I also gave TRIPP a go, which is an online meditation app thing, which was great. If you like that kind of thing.

I live in Thailand and although I speak Thai, I don’t speak it as well as I should. Fortunately, Mondly has an app that is immersive and requires speech. It was fun for learning Thai, but as a tonal language, the program incorrectly struggled to understand my perfect linguistics at times. I imagine it would be great for something more common and non-tonal like French or Spanish. I speak French and used to be pretty good at Italian and Latin, so I will check them out at some point too.

There are other experiences to be had like Mission ISS and Spheres, which were fun, but I didn’t really spend much time playing.

There are other experiences and entertaining things to see such as watching concerts, TV shows, and films in an online and interactive way. Essentially, you can virtually watch a show and make snarky comments about it with your mates. This isn’t for me or my friends, and I don’t really want to meet anyone new, I checked out Big Screen and Venues, but for now, I am not all that bothered about it.

There are already a ton of entertaining experiences that are, frankly, amazing. Especially if you are new to VR, but even if not.

Gaming and related

I should reiterate that I have a Playstation VR that has been gathering dust. The games I have played on both Oculus and PSVR, such as Superhot, are just as good. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my PS5 – it’s by far my favourite gaming system – but the VR setup is too old, heavy, and full of cables.

Beat Saber is ridiculously popular, so I gave that a bash. And then another. I adore Beat Saber. There is something so unbelievably satisfying about whacking cubes with a virtual lightsaber in time to music. I bought the Green Day and Imagine Dragons music packs as well. As an added bonus, Beat Saber really fills up your red movement ring fast if you have an Apple Watch.

Angry Birds was another obvious choice and the Isle of Pigs game is great. You are holding the catapult and firing the birds at the pig structures, and it is really well done.

Star Wars is also well represented in the Oculus store. I have all three Vader Immortal games and they are all fun. Short though. Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy is also a shitload of fun and really makes you feel part of the galaxy far, far, away.

Sports are great, so far at least. I have put a fair amount of time into Eleven – a table tennis game which really gets the physics right. Also, Walkabout Mini Golf is exactly what it says, and is superb. There are other sporty ones to try out.

There are a lot of games and I have yet to play a big one, although I have bought the Walking Dead game – it has a different title but I can’t remember it.

Conclusion

I bought the Oculus as a way to be more productive. I didn’t want it for games or experiences as I had a PSVR. However, as the headset is more comfortable and doesn’t have any wires, it has become my go-to VR experience. I love VR but always found previous iterations and devices too bulky and annoying.

Consequently, I have spent a lot of time in VR playing games, exercising, and learning languages. This is still relatively new tech and the future of the medium is going to be incredible. I will regularly check productivity apps and update the ones I have. It is possible to work in VR but it isn’t quite comfortable yet. That could change any day now.