HTC Vive XR Elite Virtual Reality Headset + Controllers

Maybe been able to use 2 or 3 times since it came in last week, it keeps resetting boundaries and non stop loading. Its almost like it cant handle head movements which is dumb since its a vr head set. YOu move your head and it starts the spinning vive symbol. Its starting to look like a waste of money

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.

The valve index had set a very high bar, years before the quest 2 ever cam to market. Based on the quality valve is known for and numerous early reviews, I was expecting an exceptional headset when I preordered this one. I already own a quest 1, quest 2 and pico 4, so Im very familiar with vr. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. The headset wasnt comfortable at all. I couldnt get a very good light seal around the face cushion. The cushion itself seemed very flimsy and had a tendency to fall off if I grabbed it the wrong way. The battery pack that attaches to the back, like the pico 4 , is a great way to balance everything. However, unlike the pico, the back doesnt pivot at all. This means you have to loosen the back every time, which is inconvenient. This might have been manageable, but the only way to keep the headset on when I moved around was to tighten it excessively so that my face bit into the face cushion and it stayed on the back of my head. (This gave me headaches after 15-20 minutes of using it.) Visually, its not very impressive either. While it does look better than my quest 2, it doesnt look better than the pico 4. Also, the field of view seemed smaller, sort of like I was looking through binoculars. I tried playing Pop One and found myself having to look around a lot more, because my peripheral vision was almost non existent. Lastly, the controllers seem like a step backward. The body of controllers are straight bulky sticks, without any effort made to help them conform to your hand and be comfortable. The controllers on the quest 2 and pico 4 both feel comfortable in my hands. The xr elites did not. Both the quest 2 and the pico 4 are better headsets than this at a lesser price.

The goods: 1. I love the futuristic form factor, it’s not as awkward as VR devices were. 2. I was amazed by how small it is, XR Elite is pretty legit 3. Wifi 6E is enabled 4. Stable and low-latency wireless streaming (tethered streaming as good as always) 5. I am excited for the MR gasket, please make it affordable The concerns: 1. The Android interface need to be polished more … 2. The passthrough mode in a low-light environment can be improved

Dude...dont buy this unless you are strictly using it for PCVR. Half the apps dont work. The controllers bug out. The lens are glary . There is practically zero games. No refund policy for games. Oh yeah you heard me right. No refund (meta lets you refund anything as long as you havent played it over 2 hours) and the fan is crazy loud. This thing feels very underdeveloped. We got scammed man

the face cushion had no padding along the top, where it has hard plastic pressed up against your forehead. just from completing the setup i had a painful red spot

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 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.

PROS - Built in speakers. They are simple but they do the job. I dont care too much about audio quality, so I cant speak for those who do. For me its good. - Form factor. Being able to lie back is a game changer for me. I love how compact and lightweight the device is. The design is great and it looks super cool and futuristic on your face if thats important to you. I really dont see myself going back to bigger headsets. - Diopters. Diopters worked well. I just adjusted each eye to my prescription and thats it. So nice not needing my glasses, but if you have a prescription higher than -6 (or have astigmatism), youre out of luck. - Passthrough. This is my first time experiencing passthrough in VR and I found it very useful being able to see my surroundings just by double tapping a button on the controller. The passthrough is not in 3D, but I think theres definitely something going on to simulate depth. Its a bit wonky at times. CONS - Software. Its basic and broken. The pre-installed apps crash, the brightness setting is completely non-working, hand tracking is simply too frustrating to use, the home environment will not boot up if your room is too dark, (but they make you figure that one out for yourself), most of the pre-order bonus apps are not yet available, and almost everything else is coming soon. For the price, I expected high quality software, but this is basically alpha pre-consumer software. Users shouldnt have to find complicated workarounds just to get basic features functioning. Sorry, but software should just work without effort. As far as apps go, there are very few, but I do keep seeing new ones pop up. Still no YouTube VR, Bigscreen, or really any of the other basic ones youd expect. - Fan Noise. The fan is loud, especially in passthrough mode. It almost makes me not want to use passthrough mode. - IPD slider. I expected a clean feeling slider, but the slider is gummy and hard to move. Its not a precise slider. - Gasket. The front gasket falls off too easily, but only if youre moving around a lot. If youre a stationary user, this wont be an issue. - Comfort. Wearing the headset with the battery cradle is not very comfortable for me. Luckily, glasses mode feels much better. - FOV. I would not say FOV is bad, but I was expecting better for the price. You definitely notice a binocular-like vision but considering the form factor, its acceptable. I cant speak for PCVR, but I havent heard good things sadly. Despite its issues, I still think this is a good headset for my use case and with better software, it could easily be a great headset. VIVE, if youre reading this... Show me how magical software can be. Software makes hardware great. You have to wow people. Dont ship boring broken software. I am excited for future updates.

I had in the past almost all the be headset. I returned the quest pro cause it was too expensive for what was offering plus was uncomfortable. When I heard the htc elite is so small I ordered immediately. Was a big disappointment. Uncomfortable and even if they was advertising bigger fov that the quest it was seems smaller. I couldn’t keep it.