HTC Vive XR Elite Virtual Reality Headset + Controllers

Horrible first-day experience at the initial setup, the software was a disaster, so many issues with the connection to the PC and phone. It appears HTC is aware of the problem and addressing the problem soon after users pointed it out. Hand tracking is improved, at least it no longer recognizes my feet as a 3rd hand. and Phone mirroring connection is now stable to a usable level. There are many other issues that still need to be addressed before a fair judgment can be passed on the unit. The good news is the developer has not given up on it yet. so I will keep the unit for a month to see.

So for this being a brand new product and everything. I would really highly recommend people getting this one versus the quest and all that personally. there isnt a lot of games On here yet but the games are really nice. I think the biggest problem a lot of people are having is that. You need to connect the app to your headset. Once you connect the app to your headset get it updated get everything going through there its Really Good its not bad at all. Its really clear you can change how everything looks itll dial into your view center. Everythings really beautiful I personally havent found anything bad with it yet. The hand tracking is a little different and a little buggy but I dont like using my hands all the time so im still experimenting with it. I love the way the headset sits on my head how it feels. I think its really nice and I think its worth the money and some of the games that you buy for it right now really nice. I would at least try it knowing that you have to add the app to it to make sure it runs good.

The XR Elite is a wonderful product that is horrifically painful to wear. There are a lot of good things about it but ultimately the pain was what made me get rid of it. The optics are really, really good. Edge to edge its super clear. Even when the HMD jiggles around and loses centering everything is still clear. You can truly look with your eyes. In complete blackness you notice the screen isnt as black as it could be. When a high contrast object shows up in the darkness it will tend to glow a little bit. It doesnt look like light shafts but instead multiple instances in a line losing definition. They have individual Diopters as well but I left them both at zero. There is IPD Adjustment using a very coarse slider instead of the usual dial on other HMDs. Its kind of difficult to get it dialed in to the exact sub millimeter but the lenses are very forgiving so precision wasnt needed. The IPD adjustment did jiggle itself loose once when moving a lot in VR. The screens are pretty good minus the blackest of blacks, though coming from a Vive Pro 2 there isnt much difference. Resolution is dense and not much more could be stuffed in without the battery suffering. When used fully standalone the battery life is somewhere between bad to okay. For a quick XR adventure its no problem which is what I think HTC is aiming for, not multi-hour adventures into the mist. I dunno if it was atypical but without the rear battery cradle the HMD would power on for about a second then shut off. With the battery cradle fully charged it lasted a little under 2 hours. When plugged into a computer it would charge but the drain would be larger than the supply. From full it would last around 3 hours when plugged into a PC. The controllers battery life is a totally different story. They would drain passively over the week and every time I went to use them they would be zeroed out completely. They automatically wake up from the tiniest of movements and theyd randomly wake up in the middle of the night from a 2.0 earthquake or something. I eventually left them on the charger for days on end until they would be needed to circumvent their drain. When fully charged I think they are supposed to last 6 some hours. Other than the controllers battery lives there isnt much to say about them. They feel comfortable in the hand and the buttons are in logical places. The thumb stick is kind of hard to push down but thats really about it for the main controls. They are kind of hard to differentiate left from right from feel alone if you dont have pass through mode enabled. They tracked well enough for the games I played but it got a little annoying when they got out of tracking space like above the head. They would track for about one second using only gyro and accelerometer when out of visual range then theyd go rotation only, no position. One second is enough if youre just tapping your back or putting a hat on but anything further and its a mess. The HMDs self tracking is pretty good and it never really bugged out. In complete darkness it would complain but even some ambient lights like monitors it worked well enough. Pass through mode must have some crazy noise reduction because I can still make out shapes in darkness. Upon startup it asks to create a playspace that you draw on the ground. Usually thats just a room minus some furniture. If for any reason you completely leave that playspace while wearing the HMD, like in passthrough mode, it will completely lose the original playspace and ask you to create a new playspace. If you agree to make a new playspace itll kick you out of whatever content you were looking at to do the setup. To get around this you can probably just draw a playspace that includes every room you think youll be in. I really wish it was less dependent on defined playspaces than it currently is. The XR Elite is basically bound to one area, despite being standalone and portable. AR content is basically non existent on the XR Elite. Its primarily VR stuff with passthrough visuals in case you step out of bounds. There built in hand tracking which is cool but limited to only a gimmick because the entire UI is built like a VR interface. You dont reach out and touch any buttons or wave for gestures or anything like that. You vaguely point your wrist at a button then pinch your fingers to simulate a click. There is some content that uses the hand tracking a little better but not the home UI. There is an option to allow the hand tracking to pass through to SteamVR as a controller emulator. You can pinch your fingers to pull the trigger. You can also flip your right hand over and pinch to open the XR menu. Thats about it. The built in speakers are actually decent. The Quest 2 internal speakers arent quite as good and the PiMax 8KX strap speakers were a joke. Your ears are fully unobstructed so you can still hear your environment which is useful when activating passthrough. Youll notice an extreme lack of sub and bass through the speakers. They are fine for music like jazz and is particularly suited for human voices. If the environment outside the XR Elite is noisy things get progressively worse but thats the nature of off-ear solutions. For discussion between 10 some people I kept the volume at about 90% most of the time. The ergonomics SEEMED good at first but quickly devolved once positioned. The gasket around the face was really soft and pliant around the sides but at the top there is a plastic bridge that goes over the eyebrows. When using the battery cradle to crank down that plastic bridge gave me a headache after about an hour and I kept loosening the battery cradle until it just fell off. 100% of the tension is placed right on that forehead bridge. Since there is no top strap to keep the XR Elite elevated it only relies on squeezing around the head to stay up. The battery cradle side was comfortable but the effects at the front are unforgivable. There is also the alternate Glasses Mode which takes the battery cradle completely off and turns it into what looks like super techy glasses. The temples grab on ULTRA hard and the sides of my head were immediately aware of something trying to reduce the width of my skull. I wear medium-large motorcycle helmets and anyone with a wider head would be worse off. That being said, it was more comfortable than having my forehead be in pain though anything is more comfortable than being stabbed. There is a TINY amount of cushion in the temple ends that have about 1mm of squish. Problematically, it places all that squeeze on what feels like less than one square inch per side so you really feel it. Surprisingly even though there is no back strap to keep the XR Elite held on it manages to stay on my face, fully planted, through a bunch of action games I played. You might ask, how did I power the XR Elite without the battery cradle? You can use any power bank that outputs 12v like QC3.0/4.0 or variable voltage stuff. Generally, if it can charge a laptop it can definitely power the XR Elite. I put the power bank in my pocket and ran a 3 foot cable up to the cable holding pinch at the right temple and into the power slot. My power banks are decently large, two being 50wh and another at 100wh, and last way longer than the included battery cradle. You can also push the power banks through the battery cradle and get all the extra charge associated. With a quick charging power bank itll push the battery cradle to 100%. As soon as the power bank dies itll go back to using the battery cradles charge and in this time you can plug in another one or ride the remaining energy to the end. Additional note, the battery Cradle can be used for USB tethering. I thought it was just a charge port but it pushed data through just fine. I plugged it into a USB 3.2g2 port but Im not sure how fast the batter cradles port is, might be 3.2g1 or it might even be 2.0. The cabled port on the side of the XR Elite obviously has full USB capabilities but without a power source it wont do much. There is also an additional USB-C port to the right of the right eye and to the left of the temple thats hidden. I didnt manage to try that port out but I believe its a host port. Tethering is great on the XR Elite. Just install the app on both a PC and the XR Elite, make sure Wi-Fi is working OR the USB is tethered, and in the XR just click Streaming App. That kind of convenience made me really, really like the XR Elite. There was a few times when the Wi-Fi streaming would get a bit overcompressed possibly from environmental issues. Upping the SteamVR resolution had ZERO effect on visual quality since it must pass through the Streaming Hub compression in the end. Upping the resolution just made more pixels have to fit through the same bitrate through Wi-Fi which had negative effects scaling up. There seemed like some of the gradients would lose a bit of smoothness, especially in light greys to slightly darker greys, while using the Streaming Hub. The convenience factor was just too good though. Ultimately, the Wi-Fi on the XR Elite stopped working. That combined with the extremely painful mounting systems brought me to the final crossroad. I returned it.

This device is peak HTC. Pure form with no function. I sincerely don’t understand who these high-end standalone headsets are made for. To me, these are like prototype cars: they look cool and include cutting edge technology, but have no business being sold to consumers because they have no practical purpose. I experienced three major issues that will never be fixed, regardless of what HTC claims: 1. This was not designed as a PCVR device. You cannot readily stream PC content with or without a USB cable. Wireless is awful and it’s the hardware/software, not me. Other wifi 6E streaming devices I’ve used have flawless streaming on my network. USB tether is not the fix either. Everything about it is tedious or broken. When you get it to work, the images are compressed, frame rate is 75hz instead of 90hz, and it randomly freezes. Some people are saying HTC can fix this with an update, but that is impossible because there’s actually a major issue built into the device: you can’t stream via USB and charge at the same time. That’s why they make a big deal about hot-swappable batteries, it’s because otherwise you can only use this for 2 hours at a time unless you’re in standalone/wireless mode and plug it into the wall. Some owners and even HTC suggests daisy-chaining a battery into the PC connection, which barely helped in my experience, and is a ludicrous thing to accept as a solution. How hard would it have been to design a two-pronged cable that can provide data and power from the PC? Instead you have to buy a cable they made for a different headset they released years ago. Just admit that the HTC XR Elite wasn’t designed for PCVR. Stop lying HTC. 2. The sunglasses mode is a scam. I don’t see how it’s not a scam. You cannot actually use it in sunglasses mode because the headset’s internal battery is minuscule. This is not just a PCVR issue, this applies however you use the device. The internal battery’s job is maintain minimal power during disconnects so the device doesn’t have to do a complete reboot. Therefore sunglasses mode doesn’t work without being plugged in so it begs the question: plugged into what with what exactly?? The battery with the 8inch cable they provide? And the battery then goes where? Should I be wearing a battery backpack? I might as well just strap the stupid battery to my head at that point. The only way it works is with the aforementioned daisy-chained battery method, which means buying cables and splitters that you may not have, making this device even more expensive to do something poorly that it should be doing perfectly and natively out of the box. What is the benefit of sunglasses mode when it comes with literal strings attached? Absolutely brainless design. 3. My final issue won’t apply to everyone but is an absolute guaranteed deal breaker for anyone it applies to. You cannot use glasses with these, which isn’t a secret, as they advertise built-in diopter adjustment. Alone, not being able to wear glasses isn’t necessarily a negative. However, some people wear glasses for reasons that a simple diopter adjustment isn’t going to fix. Good luck if you have mild or worse astigmatism or wear lenses for anything other than basic myopia. The fundamental problem for me personally is that corrective lenses are fractional but the diopter adjustment is just rotating the lens between 0 and 6 until your vision is less blurry. It doesn’t display what you have it set to and even worse, it doesn’t seem to actually go all the way to 6.00. My vision is -5.50 and -5.75 and it is still blurry. Not VR blurry, but “this isn’t my prescription blurry.” This was the nail in the coffin for me, doubly so for fear that if my vision ever gets worse, the XR Elite becomes completely unusable. At the end of the day, this is a product with no audience. HTC built a really cool device for no one. They packed it full of next gen VR features, but they didn’t ensure that any of them actually work and the sum of its parts is less than the whole. I honestly had the same exact experience with their first major headset released in 2015, it is wild that they’ve learned nothing. HTC has a terrible habit of designing products that sound amazing in theory, but they don’t care how they function in practice. HTC advertises PCVR but wireless streaming is extremely buggy at best and USB streaming requires you purchase a $100 cable and jerry-rig in a battery somehow … and it still won’t work that well. Sunglasses mode sounds, looks, and feels awesome, but literally doesn’t work without connecting a battery somehow which defeats the purpose. You don’t have to wear your glasses (and can’t), but the included solution isn’t sufficient to give a clear picture for a large minority of people. All-in-all, I can’t recommend this to anyone.

I have been in vr since 2016 and owned most headsets. This is the worst experience Ive ever had with VR. Streaming has issues via USB or wireless (I have a dedicated wifi6e router and zero issues with Quest 2 or Vive focus 3 at ultra quality streaming). IPD constantly adjusts on its own. Unusable as a standalone or with PCVR in its current state. HTCs own forums and Reddit are filled with the same problems. Dont buy.

Preface to this review: I have an extreme negative bias towards Meta and refuse to use their products, so Im completely unable to compare this product to any of the Quest offerings. Ill primarily be comparing against the Valve Index. Furthermore, as other reviews have pointed out, the standalone experience is sorely lacking, and in my opinion HTC should have delayed the launch of this headset until they were able to get more apps into their storefront. Because of this, Ill only be focusing on the PCVR experience here. The HTC Vive XR Elite is not the best headset in any one category. Its not the best looking image (PCVR), it doesnt have the best controllers, it doesnt have the best tracking, and its not the smoothest experience out of the box. What it does have, is portability; both portability in travel and portability between users. We have a Valve Index already in our house, and sharing that experience is tedious to say the least, which means in the year weve had it in our house of 4, weve pretty much never shared a VR experience all together. That changed only a few days after the XR Elite arrived. The ability to quickly swap between different users of differing prescriptions, the ability to adjust the IPD to fit my (admitted hey-Arnold-esque) head, and the lack of a top strap to accommodate the widest range of hair styles make it an actually fun and immersive experience you can ***enjoy with your friends and family*** instead of alone. Ill admit the Quest lineup is probably pretty similar here, but as I mentioned above, I refuse to in any way support their parent company, and thus here I am. I believe that this product is perfect for those looking for a higher-end product as their first foray into VR, and many of the flaws the XR Elite has, I hope HTC is able to solve (primarily the lack of apps in the storefront). If youre listening HTC, one thing I would love to see is the ability to integrate with other controllers. The XR Elite can already track my hands, but it cant pair with Index Knuckle controllers and track those instead? Of course Id be giving up some precision the Knuckle controllers usually have by removing the base stations, but I cant see why it isnt possible. That, or release some higher-quality feeling controllers. All in all, I really wanted this to be a 4-star or 5-star review, and I think for the right person (such as myself) it definitely is, but as for the general public... Its a hard sell given that they probably dont share the same aversion to Meta as I do.

Streaming from PC Sucks, the thing is constantly in a loading screen (let me tell you how exciting VR is watching a HTC logo for 20 mins...), The left lens is literally littered with green dead pixels like it got hit by a magnet or something. Im looking into a return.

Great for wireless vr gaming! I have not used it for other purposes but this headset works very well for steam. Be sure to have good wifi and itll fun flawlessly. I dont have 6e or anything fancy, just a good router (netgear nighthawk) and streaming to elite with no problems.

I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with this headset so far. It really is as small and light as you would expect, and I don’t get a headache wearing it like I do with other headsets. The hand tracking is fun, but I’ve found I like using the controllers more. Biggest thing for me though is the passthrough. I thought I didn’t care about AR, but it’s really neat being able to look around your room and make drawings, sculpt objects, whatever. Now I just gotta decide what other games to get for it.

Marketing so aggressively to such a niche market is only risky if you are unable to deliver, and this headset falls very short of expectations they themselves set. The hardware has promise, in so far as I could be OK with it IF the software experience wasnt so underwhelming. I certainly would like to veer away from Meta to support privacy centric efforts and willing to pay a premium for that. However the state of the UI / UX is so rough, that I do not have the patience to cheerlead for future updates will sort this out. Not for $1200 after tax. I was ready to scoop up accessories and lean into this headset, but I will happily continue on with PCVR via the Quest 2 headset for now. It really boggles the mind how they could even ship a product with software in such a state as if there were no market leaders present currently highlighting the short coming so plainly. Hopefully they can get sorted on future iterations. Im increasingly interested in Big Screens product despite the workarounds for feature parity as I am not skeptical about their marketing. Unfortunately my opinion of HTC is now negatively informed by their willingness to ship a product that over promises and under delivers.