Kind of apples and oranges, with the Index being twice as expensive, requiring a gaming PC, and being wired.

Yeah. One is a VR HMD and the other is a paperweight to get people to sign up for Facebook.

I strongly dis-recommend the Index.

I got one to try to replace my Rift because of this FB account fiasco but sold it 2 days later as it was so disappointing. Horrible black levels, those horrible hovering headphones, also bad for porn since the controllers are not easy put on one handed.

Now hoping the HP Reverb G2 is the thing although HP has a horrible rep for being abusive to customers as well as waiting to see.

HP can be as abusive as they want as long as there's no way to remotely disable your device and you can play Steam games on it.

I don't care if my HP account gets deleted.

The hovering headphones are amazing. You know the Reverb 2 uses the exact same ones as the Index, right?

You can dislike them, but you are very much in the minority on that.

Audio-science time! (for a given amount of science in a field full of homeopathy): the headphones NOT touching the ears is important to preserve the feeling of sound coming from around your head (the outer ear shape is not compressed) instead of from withing your head.

Porn was one thing the original Oculus CV1 package did good – they've included a special pilot for multimedia.

You can use your own headphones (there’s a 3.5mm jack) and you should stop watching porn.

Any recommendation that can truly replace Quest has to offer the same experience, namely: standalone, no wires, and no complicated setup.

Disagree, to me that's like saying PS5 has to match an iPhone 12. No, I'd say it's the other way around. Quest has a mobile GPU so it can't deliver the top VR experiences. That it's easier to use, no wires the same way an iPhone is easier than a PS5 might be true but I can't play PS5 AAA games on an iPhone and I can't play VR AAA games on a Quest

So you're essentially agreeing. They are two different product categories.

> Any recommendation that can truly replace Quest has to offer the same experience

> Disagree, to me that's like saying PS5 has to match an iPhone 12

You can't replace your iPhone with a PS5. Similar to how the Quest experience can't be replaced by the Index, and vice versa.

Samsung Galaxy S8/S9 (ideally the snapdragon ones) + Gear VR.

Gear VR does not enable a 6-DOF headset. And it's still somewhat linked to Oculus / Facebook.