I’ve already written an article or two musing about our current VR technology and how it relates to that of fiction, how we might see concepts like The Oasis from Ready Player One come to life. We talk a lot about Metaverses, treadmills, more advanced VR gear, but one thing I think very few people bring up is how viable it is to actually use a VR Headset for a decently long amount of time. I mean, if you’ve used VR, you know that certain people can get motion sick, certain people need to take breaks, and while I consider myself to be on the higher end of VR Tolerance, I know that I’ve tuckered myself out on VR before, so I’ve decided to actually put it to the test to see how long one can reasonably use a Meta Quest 3 and the things they’re able to do on it in that time.

Longform Gaming

Virtual Reality games can often feel like theme park rides, instead of meaningful video game experiences. I suppose, in our day and age it can start to feel like that can apply to all games, but VR games in particular feel more “Experience-oriented” as opposed to offering valuable game mechanics, characterized by very short, mechanically undense experiences that can sometimes feel like you’re watching a carnival experience with expensive 3D Glasses, and even games that have mechanics, as I stated in my AAA Article, can feel like 20% Video game and 80% Accessibility features. 

Despite that, though, there have been a handful of genuinely great games released for VR, and not just games like Blade and Sorcery and Bonelab, which would be very little if placed into a different medium. But certain games like Half-Life Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners show that the medium has genuine potential outside of pulling levers and climbing ladders. Consequently, as these games reflect the length of more traditional video games, I elected to play Saints and Sinners to test how long both I and the Quest held up. 

I started a new save, went through the tutorial, and I was able to make it past the first four or five story events in the game, plus a few supply runs (Saints and Sinners has a robust crafting system that reminds of Fallout 4 that requires you to search for junk and supplies in the wild) And made it to the start of day 6. I expected to grow tired a while before this, but this game has a way of sucking you in, and It didn’t bother me much; as it turned out, the Meta got tired before I did. 

I had been aware of this, but it was really coming to my attention during the writing of this article, which is that the Battery in the Meta Quest 3 is fairly weak. I was able to get that far in Saints and Sinners, and I likely could have gotten further, if it wasn’t for the battery dying. I hadn’t been playing very long, An hour and a half – two hours, which isn’t that long in game time, the Quest crapped out, and I had to put it on the charger for almost longer than my playtime in order to get it back to full battery. I figured, though, Saints and Sinners is a more intensive game than something like VR Chat, or even just using the quest menu to stream movies or videos, speaking of which..

Watching Movies in VR

My next batch of testing came when I decided to watch something in VR, to test the Viability of such a thing. I’ve played with it before, but it never really seemed meaningful to me, but I figured, for the sake of the article, I’ll try.

I simply sat down on my office couch, opened up the browser on the Quest menu, navigated to Disney+, and sat back to watch Predator: Killer of Killers. I won’t talk about how the movie was (I liked it a lot) but what matters to the conversation is the runtime, which was roughly an hour and a half. I figured that the Battery should be able to handle it because it was displaying a single window, at full battery, and I managed to get through the entire movie, but halfway through the credits, the Meta Quest died again. This made my doubts toward the battery even worse, as I hadn’t had anything else running and it died just as quickly as if it were playing a highly intensive game. Perhaps this issue could be solved by an external battery, and some have recommended playing with the charger cord attached, but that defeats the entire purpose of the Quest, no? If I wanted to have wires attaching me to a computer like some dystopian sci-fi junkie, I’d have bought a Valve Index. 

Solutions and Conclusion

There’s a lot of ways to look at the obvious problem here, an external battery, maybe a better headset, but the reality is that VR isn’t really built like it is in fiction. VR is meant for relatively short bursts of Immersive gameplay, if the battery doesn’t die, you’ll get exhausted eventually. I think, while a hypothetical better headset with a longer-lasting battery and better graphical capabilities would be great, I think we shouldn’t be moving toward the Oasis. VR Treadmills would be awesome as a novelty, I personally would love to play a game like Skyrim VR with such a thing, but VR as a medium has a variety of usages outside of just gaming, like Art, Work, saving money on technology, and a great many other things – VR has massive untapped potential, but I think it needs to be moved in the right direction. I can’t see a world where VR could ever replace flatscreen games, but I can see a world where it can supplement them, as well as other Mediums. These battery problems and other finicky features that the Meta Quest and other headsets have is a symptom of being on the cutting edge, maybe even ahead of their time. VR needs a bigger push, lest it continue to fall out of the public consciousness and VR is only really remembered as a weird phase the gaming industry had.