Today I publish a review about the magnetic lenses for Meta Quest 2 sold by VR Rock, a Chinese company selling accessories for VR headsets. Since I have no need for prescriptions, I have tested the anti blue light lenses with no prescription.
Unboxing
This has been one of my easiest unboxings ever: inside the box, I have found lots of pluriballs, and then inside finally a small case with the lenses inside. You can watch it all in this short video here below:
Setup
Setting up the lenses has been quite easy following the tutorial on the VR Rock website. Every lens element is composed by the lens itself, which has three little magnets around it, and the holder, which is another circular plastic object with the same shape as the lens but no glass inside, which has also three little magnets. All you have to do is take one of the “empty” holders and push it so that to make it stick around the lens of the Quest 2: when you hear a click, it is correctly stuck around the Quest lens. Then you have to do the same with the other one, taking care of putting the one with the “L” written on the left lens, and the one with the “R” around the right lens. After you have installed these two holders, you can put the prescription lenses on them, and the little magnets will make sure that the lenses will stay in the right place. You can watch me installing the prescription lenses in the following video:
As I have said, the setup has been quite easy, but I had some issues installing the holder of the right lens on the Quest. I don’t know if the shape was not perfectly correct or if the material was not bending in the right way, but it took me more time than expected to make it “click” by moving the lens holder in every possible way. This has been a little problem I found with my pair of VR Rock lenses. Luckily, once I made it snap, the holder was stable. But this issue left me the impression that the manufacturing was not a premium one.
Video review
I have made a video review of these lenses, and you can watch it here
…otherwise, as it is tradition of this blog, keep reading for the usual textual review!
Comfort
Once I installed the lenses, I immediately tried my new modded Quest. And I’ve found exactly the same problems that all people online describe about magnetic prescription lenses in general.
First of all, they make the lenses of the headset thicker. The holder and the lens touch all the circular region around the eye, so it is strongly advised to add a glass spacer to your headset, or you may feel too much pressure from the prescription lens on your eye and the surrounding area. Even removing the lenses and just keeping the holders still applies more pressure on the top of the nose, because it makes the circle of the lens of the headset a bit wider. This pressure on the eye is a common problem of this kind of lenses, and I have to say that is always good to keep this in mind when you buy this kind of accessory. I think the pressure is bearable, but anyway diminishes the overall comfort of the device.
Even worse than that, there is the problem that since the magnets are not strong enough (because they are little), the lens can slightly move on top of the holder. You can see this in the video here below:
When you move your head during a VR action game, also the headset slightly wobbles on your head, and this also makes the lenses have small movements around the holder while they touch your face. Since these lenses touch directly your facial bones because of the thickness, you have the sensation of something slightly moving on your bones. It’s a very weird sensation, I haven’t liked at all. So, if you wear these lenses, make also sure to secure well the headset to your head using an appropriate strap to make sure it doesn’t vibrate that much.
Anti blue light effect
As I have said, I don’t need prescriptions for my eyes, so I asked the company to just send me some anti blue light lenses.
I honestly don’t know what to say about this anti-blue light feature. If I make some light (e.g. the sunlight) reflect on the lens, I see that the reflexes are blue-ish or green-ish and this shows that actually the lens reflects away some amount of blue light. But when I put the headset with these lenses on, I wasn’t able to notice any difference from before. So I started making some tests and well, as you can see in this video, the difference in the resulting image of a blue-ish element is not that huge:
I made further tests, and the result is that yes, they make the overall display of the headset appear as slightly less luminous, and you notice that especially with the white color which becomes slightly less sharp. So some filtering of blue light happens, but it is a quite lightweight one. While wearing them I had no noticeable effect of having less eye strain, but honestly these are also things which are difficult to evaluate.
Carrying case
The lenses are provided with a cute carrying case. It is rigid, but covered with fabric, and inside there are two small pockets to carry the lenses with you safely. It’s simple, but I liked it a lot: it’s small and elegant, in my opinion.
Availability… and a little gift
You can buy these lenses (prescriptions and/or anti blue light) at this link: https://www.vr-rock.com/it/products/oculus-quest2-vr-prescription-lens . The price depends on the needed prescription, but usually is in the range of $60-80.
You can freely decide if you like them or not, but in case you want to buy them, you can use the discount code SKARREDGHOST when you check out to have a -5% discount. Thanks a lot to VR Rock for having made this little gift to all of you that read my blog!
Final impressions
I have mixed feelings about VR Rock prescription lenses. I honestly think that if you don’t need prescriptions, probably there’s no compelling need to buy them just for the blue light filtering feature. The reduction of the comfort they cause for their thickness and their vibrations is not worth the small amount of blue light they filter.
In case you need prescriptions, everything changes, though. I know from my friends that wearing glasses when you wear a headset like the Quest 2 is very uncomfortable,and also risks damaging the glasses themselves. Magnetic prescription lenses, even if they are not perfect, offer a much more comfortable experience than glasses, so they are worth the purchase. You decide what to do based on your situation.
At this point, I imagine you are wondering how these lenses stack in comparison with similar products from WIDMO, VR Lens Lab, and other ones. I honestly can’t make any comparison with the other lenses on the market because I have tried no other prescription lenses for Quest 2. The impression I had from trying these lenses and watching the review videos of the other ones, is that these ones are probably not the most premium you can find on the market, but they are anyway ok.
And that’s it for today… as usual, for every question and comment, feel free to contact me here using the comment section here below or my social media channels!