Bigscreen Beyond 2 Hands-On: Refining A Vision For VR Enthusiasts Without Apple Or Meta
When Bigscreen's founder told us he was bringing the sequel to the Beyond PC VR headset to GDC 2025, we booked a flight immediately to try it.
When Bigscreen founder Darshan Shankar told us he was bringing the sequel to his Beyond SteamVR headset to GDC 2025, I booked a flight from New York to San Francisco and back with less than 24-hour turnaround.
The reason I made the trip is because the latest design includes a new feature absent in the original which made it exceptionally hard for me to fully review. Namely, the new Bigscreen Beyond 2 adds independent adjustment of lens placement directly in front of each eye.
David Heaney
"Independent monocular IPD was made for your eyes Ian," Shankar wrote over email. "It’s not a common need, but we remembered your desire for it."
After criss-crossing the United States to test the new hardware, and after talking to Shankar for a couple hours, I can write the following sentence about Bigscreen Beyond 2:
I've never seen anything like it.
Video by Don Hopper
Bigscreen's elegant solution to lens placement involves the use of what they call an IPD Tool for manually adjusting each lens position. Apple's $3500 headset automatically moves each lens into individualized placement in front of each pupil, but Bigscreen's solution is cheaper and lighter.
The lightweight solution in Beyond 2, meanwhile, also makes the headset shareable with others with a quick change that also ensures accidental adjustments don't occur when handling the device, because there's no button or wheel to hit as is present on some other headsets.
And really, this is just cool.
This is what genuine innovation in VR hardware looks like. The tiny hex tool slips inside a small hole on either side of the Beyond 2's outer shell, and then you just twist. I asked Shankar to show me where the holes on my headset were. He handed off the tool to me as I screwed each display into place.
Yes, that's weird to write. Yes, it's weird to experience. It's also wildly cool.
I imagine this is how Robocop feels during a tuneup.
Wearing Bigscreen Beyond 2 for the first time and adjusting the distance of each lens.
Bigscreen Beyond 2: Better Optics For Enthusiastic VR Use
Bigscreen Beyond 2's design actually sheds weight compared to the first version, which was already the world's lightest fully featured VR headset, albeit one that relies on external compute, power, and tracking for all of its functionality.
While Meta, Apple and even Google steer toward ideas like mixed reality and spatial computing relying on passthrough views, Bigscreen Beyond 2 doubles down on the core premise of its own predecessor.
Virtual reality takes people to places they want to go and, when it comes to weight on your face for a transportation device, "every gram matters." I went to a great place immediately with Beyond 2 in one of Bigscreen's many movie theaters.
"I think it's just really valuable to deliver an incredible theater in your home for <$2k. That's long been the focus, and continues to be what we chip away at," Shankar wrote to me.
I saw fewer distracting internal reflections and, overall, the area of clarity is huge. Bigscreen claims "total edge-to-edge clarity", and the lenses did seem very clear to the edges. The biggest distraction for me was some kind of tracking jitter I usually associate with SteamVR base stations. This was a pre-production unit I wore, the base stations weren't in the best position and there were plenty of reflective surfaces in the area that could have caused issues. Still, it was a minor distraction during a short demo, and we'll need to see how a shipping headset holds up over many hours of wear to make a review recommendation.
The more important thing to convey is to those of you who are just learning about Bigscreen for the first time. This device is built by genuine VR enthusiasts building VR headsets for people who want to spend hours at incredible places. For those who haven't experienced VR yet, yes, there's a full theater-sized screen inside that tiny headset, and it could have just as easily been Half-Life: Alyx I was playing in there.
Bigscreen says it weighs just 107 grams, down from 127 grams in the first version. With Beyond 2, this company of less than 40 employees puts the critique that VR headsets are heavy in the past. You'd think it was an FPV viewer but, no, this really is a PC-powered VR headset you can share with family and friends.
Beyond 2 is slated to start shipping in April starting at $1019 with an eye-tracking model to follow for $1219. Bigscreen recommends an RTX 2070 or higher graphics card to drive the headset with a PC.
When you strip down "spatial computers" and "mixed reality" to the basics, you'll find a lightweight VR headset like Beyond driving a lot of time for people visiting places like VRChat, Resonite, and long trips in high-end PC simulation titles.
If the Oculus Rift VR headset had gotten smaller each subsequent generation from 2016 to now it might have looked something like a Beyond 2. You can go get a Quest or Vision Pro and wear the weight of the Apple or Meta platforms, quite literally, upon your brow.
Or go Beyond.
