Best VR headsets in 2025 for gaming, movies and more | Stuff

Ever since Oculus Rift kicked off the modern wave of VR headsets back in 2016, we’ve seen them blossom from awkward combinations of straps and black plastic that showed you an image that looked like you were viewing it down a pipe into sleek creations that cradle your head, supply surprisingly good sound, and contain high-res OLED screens with wide viewing angles.

They’re still not for everyone. Playing in VR requires an investment not just in the headset itself but in a PC or console capable of feeding it the framerates it needs, as well as in a room large enough to use the contraption without tripping over the sofa, as well as another room to store all the other members of your family while you’re doing it.

However, when the complex jigsaw of hardware, software and upholstery comes together, playing a game – or any other things you can do with a headset – in VR is an experience that’s not quickly forgotten. The extra immersion that the headset provides, with a real feeling of 3D, as well as the fact that when you turn your head, the virtual world is still there, which some game developers love to exploit with things that appear silently behind you, is impossible to beat. VR isn’t the future, it’s the right now, and these are the best headsets to experience it with.

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Quick list: what’s the best VR headset?

The best VR headsets you can buy today:

1. Meta Quest 3

Meta’s top-of-the-line VR headset is more expensive than the Quest 3S, but it brings with it enough upgrades that it makes a tempting next step if you’re past the dipping-your-toes stage of getting into home VR. Although it packs the same on-board processor, the LCD panels it uses to create a different image for each eye and produce the 3D VR effect have a higher resolution, and the lenses placed over them to funnel the result into your eyes are pancake rather than fresnel, which keeps the image clear across the field of view rather than producing a sharp spot where you’re looking and introducing blur elsewhere.

Its field of view is wider, too, meaning you get less of the feeling of viewing your VR content through a ship’s porthole. It’s a wireless headset just like the 3S, with a battery that should last more than two hours. That’s long enough for most VR sessions, as the tech can leave you feeling a bit strange after too long with the headset strapped on, and still gives some people motion sickness – that’s an issue with all headsets, not just the Quest 3, but at least having a battery to worry about forces you to take a break.

The pancake lenses mean the headset can be slimmer than a Fresnel one, and it’s light too. There’s a full-colour camera on the front, providing video passthrough for mixed reality use, including a travel mode that uses the motion tracking to smooth out the movements of a plane in an attempt to reduce air sickness. You’re still limited by the battery, and look like a berk wearing a VR headset in economy class, but it’s an interesting idea and even came with a pilot (haha) program with Lufthansa to provide MR content during flights. You can tether it to your PC, too, if you buy the appropriate cable.

The Quest 3 and 3S share the same controllers, which don’t have the ring around them as seen on the PS VR2, but provide motion tracking and haptic feedback all the same. The Meta Quest 3 offers solid performance and excellent visuals, and is a superb VR headset for playing games on.

Read more: Meta Quest 3 review

2. Meta Quest 3S

The cheapest way to experience VR without making any huge compromises, the Meta Quest 3S’s major drawback is its Fresnel lenses and a viewing angle narrower than many others, all of which means you’ll have to turn your head rather than swivel your eyes around in their sockets to see things that aren’t straight in front of you. It’s a bit like wearing blinkers if you were a horse, or some sort of Victorian modesty glasses to prevent unwanted glances at young ladies, and it’s been a part of VR since the beginning.

Luckily, the mark one human brain is pretty good at filtering things like that out, especially if you’re deeply immersed in the game you’re playing. The Quest 3S is a standalone headset that doesn’t need to be hooked up to a PC or a PlayStation – another nod toward affordability. As such, there’s battery, storage and processing on board, and you can download games from the Meta Store. 

The Quest 3S has video passthrough thanks to a full-colour camera on the front, so it can be used for mixed reality, where digital overlays appear over your view of real-world objects, as well as VR. This makes it more versatile than the PS VR2 and other VR-only headsets, though exactly how useful MR is will be up to you after you’ve experienced what it can do.

A tethering cable – the Quest Link – is available if you want to use it as a VR headset for your PC, though there’s also a Steam Link app to stream PC games to it wirelessly. It looks like a plain old USB-C lead, but it is a 5-metre fibre-optic solution to keep it light and flexible while still transferring enough data over that distance. It’s US$90 / £90, which feels like a lot when you compare it to wire-based USB-C cables, but the USB-C spec tops out at 4m for passive cables, and the extra length is useful when you’re going to be moving around.

Read more: Meta Quest 3S review

3. PlayStation VR2

The PlayStation VR2 holds a special place in the current crop of VR headsets because it can be used on two different platforms. By day, it connects to the PlayStation 5 with a single USB-C cable, playing PlayStation staples such as Gran Turismo 7 and Resident Evil Village in shiny VR. Then by night, and with the help of a simple adapter, it connects to your gaming PC and Steam to play Half-Life Alyx and Skyrim VR.

It’s a neat trick, and it’s helped by the fact that the PS VR2’s hardware is some of the best you’ll find. Launched in 2023, it’s one of the newer VR headsets on the market, and this shows in its specs. The displays are OLED, with up to 120Hz refresh rates, and this keeps everything smooth as you spin your head around, trying out the motion-tracking.

The major benefit of the PS VR2 for gaming is that it works with a PlayStation 5, a console that’s half the price of the sort of gaming PC you’ll want to use for VR games. Sony has a decent library of VR games two years after the PS VR2’s launch, as does Steam, though there’s some overlap between them and not all PC games are compatible with all headsets.

Being so gaming-focused could be a downside for the PS VR2, as it’s not really suitable for the mixed reality uses seen in the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3S, but if gaming is your thing, it’s just right. The familiar PlayStation gamepad controls are right under your thumbs on the top of the hand controllers, and everything just works without the faffing about you can endure when setting up a VR headset on Windows. The worst you’ll have to do is scan your environment to make sure there are no obstacles.

No VR headset is particularly cheap, but at US$399 / £399, you could buy a Switch 2 and have enough left over for a coffee. VR may not be entirely mainstream yet, but the PS VR2, which does so much to smooth over the barriers to enjoying it in games, is a clear step in that direction. That it can be used on a PC as well is just the cherry on top.

Read more: PlayStation PS VR2 review

4. Valve Index

The Index is made by Valve, the company behind the Steam online PC gaming store, and was launched way back in 2019. No new version of the headset is rumoured, with Valve turning its attention to the Steam Deck and Half-Life 3 (surely) instead, but it remains on sale and comes with some excellent controllers.

Its specs were extremely high back when it was released, and that means it remains relevant today. Thankfully, the price has dropped since then, but the Index still requires controllers, base stations, and a gaming PC to use, making it a less cost-effective method of playing VR games than others on this list.

However, being from Valve, there’s a lot of software available for it (and it comes bundled with Half-Life Alyx, which is one of the best VR games), though you’ll spend your time tethered to your gaming PC rather than experiencing the wireless freedom of the Quest headsets. This is fine until you find yourself turning around or stepping on the cable, at which point a short pause to untangle yourself is in order. Two front-mounted cameras provide a room view that’s not video passthrough but a 3D map of your surroundings, highlighting objects you’re close to so you don’t bang into them, and showing the position of your hands.

The controllers are capable of tracking the movement of your fingers rather than just your hands, contain force sensors that can detect you squeezing them, and have an oval in the centre that can be used as a trackpad, scroll wheel or a single big button. It’s a great design that should have been adopted by the other headset makers, and it’s a shame to see them languishing in Valve’s warehouses instead of ruling the world.

5. Apple Vision Pro

Apple’s bold vision for what head-mounted displays could become has notably not led to rubbish tips all over the land heaving with discarded 32in gaming monitors, but then it was always a mixed-reality device rather than a full VR system.

So have the graphic designers and movie editors of the world discarded their Apple Studio Displays? No, they have not. The Vision Pro at launch was a wonderfully intuitive system that led the field in things like hand and eye tracking, producing a MR system that didn’t need additional controllers and had a full Apple M2 CPU on board to provide its processing grunt. It was also extremely expensive, hitting the market at a startling £3,499. For context, you could buy six PS VR2 launch units for that, and still have £180 left over to buy sweeties.

Apple calls it a ‘spatial computer’ rather than a VR headset, though its two-hour battery life is hardly conducive to a full day’s work. For the money you get the highest resolution OLED panels on the market, while visionOS, based on the iPad operating system, allows app windows to float in the air in front of you, the camera system providing a sharp view of your surroundings and unbeatable hand tracking for the gestures you use to interact, while an internal camera projecting an image of your eyes onto a front-mounted screen, in case you feel like terrifying your co-workers with a trip to the uncanny valley.

A Vision Pro 2 is thought to be in the works, possibly even launching this year, and it will be interesting to see what Apple can do to make the Vision Pro better and, perhaps, cheaper. It remains a fantastic and futuristic idea about how we interact with our computers of the kind not seen since Apple introduced us all to the pocket touchscreen in 2007, and one that will surely someday be looked back upon as the beginning of the end for computer monitors.

Read more: I bought an Apple Vision Pro, here’s what I think after 48 hours

What to consider when buying a VR headset

Do you really want one? Could your VR itch be scratched by an OLED monitor or a huge 4K TV? Either of those things is going to be less aggravating than a VR headset, and might work out cheaper, too.

To use a VR headset, you’ll need space, as banging into things you can’t see is often painful, and some systems won’t even let you play if you haven’t cleared the area around you. Things have improved in this area, with virtual walls available that alert you if you cross them, but annoying people crossing into your field of play, then wondering why you thumped them, remains one of the main fears for the VR player. 

If you’re going to use one of the passive headsets, such as the PS VR2 or the Valve Index, you’ll need a source for games, and this means a PlayStation 5 or a gaming PC with a GPU powerful enough to drive the headset’s screens at a decent level of detail. Half-Life Alyx on a GeForce RTX 4090 is a religious experience, but you don’t have to go that far, and the new 50-series cards mean a mid-ranger is all you need.

It’s simpler still to get a PS5 or PS5 Pro, but the software selection is more limited on the Sony side of the fence.

Likewise, the standalone headsets have internal processors akin to those in smartphones. If you want PC levels of detail and PC games, you’re going to need a PC to link them to, and those can get expensive.

Finally, it’s worth trying on a headset before buying to ensure it fits your head shape, accommodates your glasses, and can be adjusted for the distance between your eyes. Without these adjustments, you’ll likely experience a blurry image. Get it all right, and VR gaming can be excellent fun, but there can also be a lot of frustration along the way.