• 10 Dec, 2025 *

My kids love playing VR. The only downside is it takes a while to charge and the battery only lasts so long. We got them an Oculus Quest 2 a long while ago but they stopped using it at some point last year.

It’s been sitting in my sons closet since then. Last night one of them asked about buying the Quest 3 when we pointed out that they don’t use the 2.

Kid: "Oh the Oculus is broken, it’s stuck in a boot loop."

Me: "Did you reboot it?"

Kid: "Yeah it just keeps doing that, it’s been broken since last year. We just need to buy a new one. Everyone on the internet has this problem, they go bad, you can’t fix it."

So I went to the closet and picked up the headset. The boys had bought a better head strap for it and all that. I’ve never personally used the Oculus or the old black one for more than a few minutes. So I went to Youtube and looked at the third or fourth video about "Quest 2 stuck in boot loop fix". I followed the instructions.

Given, this thing was not fully charged at all I plugged it in to a power supply before attempting anything. It had a black screen and blue meta logo that flashed on and off. So I held the power and volume button down for 10 seconds or so before a menu showed up. I tapped buttons until the "factory reset" option highlighted and hit the power button again to start it.

Another screen showed up saying it was wiping the device and starting over. While this happened I sat the headset down on my desk to ask the boys again if they had tried this. They said they had done everything but do the factory reset.

A few moments later the headset made a noise and I held it up to my face. Sure enough the start up menu was there, just like it would have been if I had just bought the thing. My husbands account has all the games on it and we didn’t want to repurchase so we had him log back in. Used to you had to go in and manually put in passwords and junk but now it’s just an app on your phone that connects to the device. Super easy, we were back to the main menu within minutes.

All this time I expected the thing to start the boot loop. I figured if it were a hardware issue it would kick in once it had been on long enough to warm up and cycle through a few processes. Nope. So I started reinstalling the games and letting the thing do a few missed software updates.

It’s still going strong this morning. It lets me boot up games and do everything just fine. I figure what happened was the boys were playing with it and got it down to less than 5% battery when a software update kicked in and it died while applying it.

It is fun to put on and look around the little room/house thing it starts you off in. I have no idea how to adjust the viewfinder though so it’s blurry with and without my glasses but I can adjust my eyes enough when I squint to make out words and everything. I get how VR could be much more immersive in the future. Because it’s connected to my husbands Facebook account it has options to let him chat with friends and scroll feeds etc. I don’t know if I would bother using a heavy headset like this for anything but fun/games. The joysticks have that wiggle/wobble effect that using a wiimote does when you point it at a TV screen. Not super conductive to tapping buttons or selecting things that way.

Maybe the Quest 3 is better at that but to me this tech still feels like a videogame only interface.