Virtual Reality

On one hand, it’d be easy to look at the goings-on (Meta’s layoffs, their almost complete lack of mentioning VR at Meta Connect 2025, and the probable lack of new Quest hardware this year) and proclaim, “VR is cooked.” We’ve implied as much, and there’s validity to that grim statement, to be sure. But there’s a counterpoint to that forecast, too, and it’s that maybe (just maybe) VR doesn’t even need Meta to begin with. Case in point: all of the great VR hardware as of late.

Take the Lynx R2 VR headset, which was officially revealed just this week. While the Lynx says the R2 won’t be available to order until this summer, there’s a lot to entice anyone interested in VR. The headset crushes the Quest 3‘s field of view (FOV), for one, offering a 126-degree FOV compared to the Quest 3’s 110-degree FOV. It also does something that Meta would never; it’s making its headset open-source. Lynx says it’s releasing schematics for the R2, which should help anyone who wants to mod the device do so more easily than Meta’s Quest. It’s early days, and there’s no price or official release date yet, but the hardware is promising—and Lynx isn’t the only one.

The thing is, there’s a chance that VR was never really meant to be such a massive category. As great as the experience can be, these aren’t devices that most people want to use all the time, and any company pitching one that way (looking at you, Apple Vision Pro) hasn’t really gained much traction. What if—and hear me out—VR wasn’t meant to go mainstream? Maybe it’s just a niche thing, and that’s okay?