I was fascinated by virtual reality and my frugality was tempted by Google Cardboard's promise of phone-based virtual reality on the cheap. But eventually I had to face the reality I wasted a lot of money on disappointing hardware. They were limited to tracking rotation in x, y, and z axes. (3DOF = three degrees of freedom.) I wanted the magic I first experienced with an Oculus Rift DK2 so in 2018 I committed to spend money necessary to move beyond phone-based systems (*) for a PC-based system that tracks both rotation and translation in x, y, and z. (6DOF)

For many years the market consisted of a duopoly between Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Then Microsoft convinced multiple PC hardware manufacturers to sell 6DOF VR headsets conforming to Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) specification. While still expensive pieces of hardware, they were slightly more affordable than earlier offers. Competition is good!

No matter which way I went, though, I still needed to upgrade my desktop PC video card and that had been the bigger barrier. The cryptocurrency craze made a new GPU financially unfeasible for many years. Around the middle of 2018 I found a workaround to crypto frenzy: a laptop computer with a VR-capable GPU. Laptops are not cost-effective for cryptocurrency mining, nor could their cooling systems sustain performance for cryptocurrency math around the clock. I wanted a laptop anyway and the cost premium of stepping up to a VR-capable unit was a relative bargain compared to desktop video cards being gobbled up. Around the time I got that laptop, the initial launch wave of WMR headsets like the HP Windows Mixed Reality headset model VR1000-100 could be found at a discount. As newer headsets had released, and first-gen needed discounts to be competitive.

I snapped up that bargain and as soon as I started moving around in my new HP headset, I knew the extra money was worthwhile. 6DOF tracking gave me a sense of immersion that 3DOF tracking could not match. I was glad to be back in the kind of world promised by that Oculus DK2 years ago, and I enjoyed my visits to PC-based virtual worlds far more than I ever enjoyed phone-based virtual experiences.

(*) The Oculus Quest, which launched in 2019 (about a year after this) is a 6DOF VR system that operated standalone without requiring a supporting PC. It had a lot of commonalities with high-end phones like a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and the Android operating system. It is, however, definitely not a phone.