One of the rewarding things about testing tech for a living is that your verdict on a device can change over time. The review period is generally your best effort at capturing what it's been like to live with a product for a couple of weeks, but it's impossible to know what you'll think months down the line.
Sometimes the surprise is a pleasant one, as something worms its way into your daily routine and becomes indispensable. Other times, though, it's a little more disappointing, as something confirms itself as a bit of a novelty that you don't actually use very often.
The latter is what's happened with the Meta Quest 3S VR headset that I tested at the start of this year, despite it hugely impressing me at that time. The hardware remains brilliant, to be honest, and the price continues to compel me, but the simple fact is that since finishing my review, I've barely used the headset.
This has always been the biggest hurdle for me with virtual reality – the momentum to actually use a device regularly requires some quite specific circumstances. For one thing, I think I'd need a friendship group that all owned headsets and had at least a handful of multiplayer games they wanted to regularly play together in them.
This is the hook that keeps me coming back to my PS5 Pro when I'm not playing single-player games, after all, but the bar the Quest 3S needs to clear is made higher by the fact that it's less comfortable to use. Even a headset as lightweight and cushioned as this is still far more obstructive than just sitting in front of a TV or my gaming PC.
So, instead, I've got the Quest 3S on standby, effectively. It's waiting for a killer app to launch, or indeed for a follow-up headset to be compared against, and that's something that does hold plenty of value. Still, it's a bit of a shame. The reality is that even the most enthusiastic of tech reviewers only has so many hours in each day, and if a device doesn't manage to eat some of those up, that's no shameful thing.
