HTC Vive XR Elite Virtual Reality Headset + Controllers

Where do I start.... I really wanted to like this headset and I defended many of HTCs poor choices in designing this thing... But after using it, or trying to, I cant defend this POS. 1) They marketed this as the most comfortable headset on the market and it is NOT. Its actually pretty UNCOMFORTABLE. The eye guard is made out of a stiff material with ZERO padding and a rough fabric over it. It quickly irritates your face and digs into your skin and leaves marks and hurts to wear or move around in for any length of time. 2) The headset doesnt have access to the normal typical app library, instead it has a very unique and limited app library of about 20 apps. The web browser didnt even work at launch and they didnt even notice or bother to fix it until I put them on blast on Facebook. And its still buggy as hell. 3) You dont even have access to basic apps like YouTube, Netflix, Chrome, etc. 4) the only way to play any decent apps is by linking to a powerful pc, and the HTC link software is very buggy. 90% of the games/apps wont load properly or register the controllers. And keep in mind these are all apps that work perfectly fine with my HTC Vive, Rift S, and Quest 2 Headsets. 5) The battery drains stupid fast. You have maybe an hour of use in game, 90 minutes maybe if you are using light apps. 6) They bragged about how good their eye adjustments were, but no matter what I try I cant get a good clear visual, always some blur. By contracts my HTC Vive and Quest 2 both give me a crystal clear non-blurry image. 7) The hand tracking is hot garbage, it STRUGGLES to track hands and gets their position wrong just enough to make trying to use your hands uncomfortable and cumbersome. 8) The controller tracking is also pretty bad, it frequently loses track of them even in a brightly lit room and it tracks them too low...the pointer line feels like its coming out of 10 inches below where the tip is. Makes clicking on things awkward and clunky. This thing is a steaming pile of disappointment and feels like they rushed out an unfinished product, I am going to send it back and get a Meta Quest Pro, at least I know that one will work.

I wanted to like it, after about two hours I just couldnt get it to stay focused. It just doesnt feel right for someone with a wider head. I have the same problem with eyeglasses most are not wide enough for me. I returned it, but will have to wait 30 days plus up to 7 days for the banks to process the return. This is not the normal Amazon return efund policy.

Just received my vive xr elite after much anticipation. Very disappointed. No streaming or video plays. Just black screen.

The quality of the headset is good. The full-color passthrough is really neat especially compared to my old Samsung Odyssey WMR. I also like that the controllers pair to the headset and not to my PC. My biggest complaint is that they have clearing been pushing the 5 free titles as part of the pre-order since it was listed back in January. However, only ONE of those five titles are actually available on the headset. The other 4 are apparently coming soon with no clear release date. The Viveport store is pathetic at best. SteamVR worked with a USB cable most of the time, but it would occasionally flake out. Using Wi-Fi 6 from my router in the same room was low resolution a laggy at best. Sometimes it work for a good couple minutes and other times not at all. Overall, this thing is not worth the $1100 asking price in my opinion.

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.

I got my unit today, and I have to say; ALL of my expectations were wrong. Im absolutely gobsmacked at how bad the experience is. Im coming from a Rift S; so I was under the, false, impression that no matter how bad this ended up being, itd be so far above the rift thatd Id be plenty happy to trudge through the early adopter tax and growing pains. I cant. The UI is so shoddy that after a couple hours using it I was overflowing with the desire to submit for a refund and buy a quest pro. I despise facebook, passionately; but Id rather get back into bed with them, than bytedance, and there are no other standalone wireless options to speak of. Here are a few of my takeaway Pros and Cons. PROS PCVR latency on Wifi 6 (5ghz) was actually really good. (see first Con in list below for more context) The first thing I did was, open Beatsaber and test out some E+ songs. The saber movement felt accurate and realtime, as compared to my typical displayport tethered setup. Screen quality is nice, but honestly not jaw-dropping or anything. I was expecting this to be a big upgrade, considering the Rift S is relatively low res and has Fresnel lenses, but it kind of felt equivalent/worse on the XRE, even after acclimating to the sweet spot. The unit itself is tiny, shockingly tiny. The compactness of it blew my mind, after holding it in my hands, Im convinced were only a few generations away from near sunglasses sizes of HMDs. I had NO ISSUES with setup, or with pairing for wireless PCVR, everything connected more or less immediately. The instructions were sometimes poorly worded, but mechanically, each step worked out as would be expected. **I did have to segregate my 2.4ghz network, because it was preferring it over my 5ghz when I was allowing the router to decide. The 2nd accessory USB-C port(beside the right eye lens) does support USC-C Audio, so when I plugged in my 3.5mm adapter, it worked instantly with no configuration or other steps. The port is deeply recessed though, so the majority of USB-C ends will probably not fit. I used the official adapter that Apple sells, it has very thin insulation on the cable end. The in-arm speakers are excellent, better than most would expect. I had no issues with stereo positioning while using them. Aside from privacy uses, I dont think Id have used my headphones for anything else. The unit is capable of functioning, in glasses mode, for a while on the 15W from a standard PC USB-C port. It does drain the internal battery, but that will depend entirely on your use case. The inability to get consistent tracking results seemed to constantly cause it to spin up into full power while searching for the controllers and landmarks. So its hard to say how long I would get away with it. Seemed like an hour or two would be possible with light-ish use. The full color pass-through was really nice. Had no problem walking around, fixing myself a drink, reorganizing things around the room, etc... Very nice. There was definitely some warping in the image, so someone who is focused on AR/MR might find it intolerable; but for the home user in a casual setting, it was super useful to get around and do stuff without taking off the headset. CONS Controller and Hand tracking is abysmal. Im shocked at how poorly this tracks in low-medium light settings. I can put on my Rift S, in a fully dark room, with only a TV offering indirect lighting, and it tracks extremely well. The XRE needs every light in the room on maximum brightness, or it will constantly lose tracking. This made playing high level Beatsaber almost impossible under normal lighting conditions. If I turn on all my lights I get passable tracking, otherwise the controllers would lose tracking during any quick motions. Even with all my lights on, it had a VERY hard time tracking movement on the outer edges of the play-space. This can be improved with software over time, because its clear the predictive algorithms facebook uses for the Rift S can outperform it on older hardware using the same type of camera+controller gyro setup. The screen glare/light bleed are annoying. The blurriness you get from Fresnel lenses is, in my estimation, equivalent to the lens glare on the XREs pancakes. Its not like Im not used to it on my Rift, but I really thought the pancake lenses would be a huge increase in clarity. I see these as essentially a 1:1 swap. The OS is terrible. It looks pretty, and the options I sought out were almost always where I expected them to be in their respective menus; however, the OS itself was rife with bugs. Swapping in and out of apps would cause inexplicable system hangs that would have bizarre compounding effects, like sporadically unpairing the controllers until I did a hard system reset. This would happen in standalone and PCVR, however, the issues were far more severe on PCVR and required frequent resets and reopening PC apps and steam VR in a just-so method to allow it to function without breaking. The ability to reorient yourself is treated like a one-time initial device setup, instead of something youd do constantly. This might just be an issue of how I use VR. Sometimes Im on my couch, or standing in my VR space, or sitting at my desk. In the Oculus software, I can just long-press my menu button in the home screen and Im instantly reoriented to my current facing. I probably do this half a dozen times in every VR session: whenever I move over in my chair, or lean back on the couch, or move over while standing for better positioning, etc... The XRE experience is terrible in this regard, it loses its relative position without warning or skews the home screen position to some nonsense location and direction, but its reset position option, in the one tap menu popup, rarely reorients true to your heading, and often tries to honor some absolute positioning it has decided on its own. Once you combine this with the repositioning of apps in steamvr, its compounded into a nightmare of rinse-repeat in both interfaces until the app youre running is finally aligned correctly. The boundary settings are extremely limiting and cant be disabled. This is one of the most damning things in my list. If you set a huge boundary to avoid being interrupted by it, youll be punished by the system relocating your displays all over the place. If you use stationary, youd better stay still. Your floor position may change sporadically if tracking is lost temporarily. Any deviations from the boundaries, in stationary or room-scale, seem to have a 50/50 chance of causing standalone apps to crash, or streaming to crash, or to cause a system hang that needs a hard reset. This is all ridiculous to me, because, while I dont need boundaries, anyone who does, would probably have an awful experience with it. When I set up my Rift S years ago, by the 2nd week Id turned off guardian completely, and Ive never gone back; but even when it was on, it never broke system operation. Hand tracking, technically works. Ive never had a hand tracking headset before, so I dont know if its this awful on other hardware too; but it seems like to function at the level of a gimmick. It seems to struggle tremendously with the changing shape of hands as they move or rotate; which strikes me as the sort of thing that would be first-in-line-things-to-resolve in a hand tracking system. Like the controllers, it requires as much light as possible, and its not usable in low-med light scenarios. The idea of taking the XRE anywhere without its controllers seems impossible to me. As others have mentioned; in the glasses mode, the arms will dig a hole into your head if your head is too large. It was pretty painful for me after ~40minutes, so if you decide to work through it, youll probably have to sort out secondary padding. Its not bad at all with the battery pack attached, it feels like a normal headset in that mode. The central fixed-foveated rendering is way more aggressive than Id have liked, it was very noticeable anytime I was in an environment with textured walls and especially for text, looking around with my eyes left delivered an unacceptable visual mess. I havent used wireless VR before, so maybe this is a limitation of the XR2 platform and not HTCs fault; but, if its on HTC, its a huge negative. I have the hardware and bandwidth to easily push 2-3x what the headset is asking for, Id have preferred user-control over the reduced peripheral quality. settings:200mpbs/ULTRA/DynamicOFF Overall, this was a huge let down for me. I was thrilled to finally divorce facebook, in regard to my VR experiences, but its just too soon for me. HTC can improve a lot of whats wrong with this headset through software, but based on just how rough it is right now, I think thatll be more than a year away...

I have been waiting for this headset for several months and it is a big disappointment. The Bad: 1. The right lens has two dark specs that are either dead pixels or dirt inside the lens. 2. Vive streaming app is very buggy and does not work very well with Steam VR. 3. Controller support on steam vr games is a big challenge. Many of the games are unusable with the controllers and you need to do a lot of tweaking and hopefully get them to work. 4. Before I got the controllers paired I tried to log into my account with hand gestures and the keyboard. This was totally unusable with missing keystrokes and erratic pointer movement. I had to pair the controllers to get this accomplished. 5. Headset draws more power than the usb 3.0 port on my computer can supply and I slowly saw my battery drain while connected to the computer via usb. Need to try other ports before making a final determination. 6. Face mask is not very comfortable but could be tolerated. Need to look at other solutions. The Good: 1. Very light headset especially without the battery pack. 2. Foldable and very portable. All you need is a power source. 3. Works very well with usb c dongle providing power delivery with a wired ethernet connection. It detects the ethernet connection as a tethered usb port. 4. Picture quality is excellent depending on which app you are using. Summary: In conclusion I think that this product was released prior to being ready. The software issues could be resolved if you are willing to wait for fixes, but there is no excuse for the quality issues with the lenses. I like the ergonomics and portability of the product enough to keep it because I believe that the software issues could be resolved in time however I will be replacing my defective unit. Hopefully Amazon will have one to replace it with. Update - March 29, 2023 ----------------------------- Spent several hours with the headset mainly without the battery pack in glasses mode working with steam vr. Following are the results. 1. The Headset pinches on the sides of the head making my head sore right above the ears. This was after several hours of use and now after 12 hours of resting, my head is still sore to the touch. The nose bridge pinches my nose making it difficult to breath but got used to it. 2. I installed the Vive Streaming App beta version and it works better than the released version. 3. Controllers started working with most apps after I disabled the compatibility setting in the streaming app. For some reason the default setting after installation was with compatibility on. This was a major accomplishment since it made the product usable. 4. Most steam vr games I tried worked fine once I got the controller issue resolved in 3 above however I could not get Flight Simulator 2020 to work even though it works fine with the Quest 2 and Pico 4 on the same system. Got a lot of stuttering and the streamer kept on losing connection. 5. Streaming both wireless and usb tethering mode worked fine. I barely noticed any difference between the two. I have mixed feelings about this headset. I think the comfort and software issues could be overcome. I really like the size and portability and modularity as well as picture quality once you get your sweet spot.

Bought it for my kids 16th birthday. He got super frustrated with it. Im a Microsoft Systems Engineer and I cant even get the thing to do what its supposed to do. And our PC is a top Alienware costing over 6K. We have Unifi wireless - everything in our setup is commercial grade except for this device. It is less than fun - its frustrating. If that is what you are into - go for it. But it is total junk IMO. Wait for other options TBH. Its not worth it - ESPECIALLY at this price point. So disappointed.

I did not purchase through Amazon but thought Id leave a review here anyway. Ive been using it for a few days, so here are my early thoughts. First of all, the hardware. The headset is very tiny and lightweight - especially without the battery attached. Its significantly smaller than the Focus 3, Quest 2, Quest Pro, Vive Pro, etc. I love that you can hot-swap the battery out, and the headset is able to power itself for at least a few minutes. The fan is incredibly loud and distracting, even louder than the Vive Focus 3 fan, and it runs loud even when there are no apps open. In comparison, the Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro are nearly silent. The balance is good with the battery attached, actually the battery half weighs more than the headset half so the balance is a bit back-weighted. There is some pressure on the nose bridge and the stock face mask does not fit my face perfectly, a common complaint. Some light is leaking in from the sides which causes glare, ugh. I like the stepless toggle on the bottom of the headset to adjust IPD while using the headset, though it feels a bit unrefined. Surprisingly it stays on my face quite well in glasses mode. My complaint with glasses mode is that the headset needs to be powered via a powerbank or wall outlet. I would prefer to use a single tethered connection from the headset to a PCVR setup. AFAIK, there are no PCs with 30w power delivery which this headset requires to stay powered. HTC needs to sell a USB desktop accessory that provides tethered connection over USB as well as power via an AC adapter, similar to the dongle youd use with something like a Vive Pro. Im using this device on a special wifi network which cannot take advantage of the wireless PCVR connection, so please let me just use this as a normal tethered headset in glasses mode! I dont want to wear the battery while Im tethered! I also hate that I now have to install yet another buggy HTC program, Vive Streaming Hub, to stream PVCR. It seems nearly identical to Vive Business Streaming, but that program isnt compatible with the Vive XR Elite. The controllers are the same as from the Focus 3. Theyre fine, but not great. They feel unbalanced with a lot of weight in the bottom where the battery is. They plug in via USB-C. For some reason, HTC included a single USB-C to USB-C charging cable for the headset, and two USB-C to USB-A cables to charge the controllers. And no power brick or anything. Who was responsible for THAT decision? Okay, onto the standalone software. It feels about five or six years behind Meta OS. Its baaaad. Its not like Metas software is free from bugs either - plus theyre still running on Android 10 as of V50 - but it works so much better than this does. If youre familiar with the Focus 3 menu, this is basically the same. Any time I move outside of the boundary, I need to set it up from scratch, and that really annoying ladys voice comes on explaining each step of the process. Its like, I do this ten times a day, please stop introducing me to this process. Hand tracking is okay. Controller tracking is good. But both feel significantly behind Meta. I dont feel like I can trust the passthrough. Unlike the Quest Pro, which is pretty reliable with running the passthrough image at all times when not in an app, the Vive XR Elite is often just a black screen with the logo/loading screen. When you step outside of the boundary with the passthrough running, the passthrough image actually gets DARKER as part of the warning that youve left the boundary. This is stupidly unsafe. Another part of the problem using this device with mixed reality is that the stock face mask is fully immersive. HTC has previewed another face mask which is completely open and rests the headsets weight on a pad on your forehead, but for some reason that isnt included with your purchase. By comparison, the Meta Quest Pro comes with magnetic side blinders, and even with them installed you get a lot of peripheral light coming in from the bottom. Combined with a reliable passthrough, this helps keep your sense of place in the real world. I feel completely untrusting of the XR Elite to provide a similar experience. The passthrough image itself is pretty good. Its noticeably higher resolution to me than the softer-looking Quest Pro, especially at a distance of 2-10 feet. It appears to only use the single color camera for the passthrough image, while the Quest Pro uses an overlay of the color image on top of the four other cameras, which gives it more depth perception but also some weird b&w artifacts) There is a very strong sharpening filter applied to the passthrough image which in some senses does help with smaller details but is also kind of nauseating. I havent measured the FOV or looked at the specs but it feels a little narrower than the Quest Pro to me, and much better than the Quest 2 and Focus 3. Even for PCVR, I would be hard-pressed to recommend this device over the Meta Quest Pro, especially now that the Pro has dropped in price. The Quest Pro provides twice as much storage, face and eye tracking, a wireless charging pad, much better controllers, a much more stable OS, and a better app library/store. If youre coming from previous HTC headset, and/or you desperately want to avoid Metas ecosystem (I dont blame you), youll probably be okay with this. But the software, on both the PC and headset sides, is significantly more frustrating to deal with than it was in the past. The only silver lining is that the hardware is mostly okay, and software issues have the potential to be ironed out in the coming months. This could be a 4/5 product but the software/OS experience leaves it at a 2.

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.