Bigscreen Cut $60 Off the Beyond 2 by Changing Which Cushion Is in the Box

Bigscreen Beyond 2 now starts at $959, down from $1,019. Beyond 2e goes from $1,219 to $1,159. The company announced both on August 31 in a post on its own store blog, which also carried a shipping warning and the first good Halo Mount news since July.

The headset did not get cheaper. The $899 line item for the Beyond 2 body is the same number it was last month. What changed is which cushion comes with it.

The standard configuration used to ship with the Custom-Fit Cushion, which Bigscreen manufactures to the shape of one buyer's face from a 3D scan. That part is $120. The standard Beyond 2 now ships with the Universal-Fit Cushion instead, a thin silicone lightseal offered in soft and firm. That part is $60. Sixty dollars is also the distance between $1,019 and $959.

The custom version is still sold, as an upgrade. Owners who already have one can now buy the universal cushion on its own.

The scan is the part worth watching. A cushion built to one face is a cushion that fits one face, and the scan sat at the front of every order, which is a large part of why the Beyond 2 spent its first months in a preorder queue. Bigscreen names sharing and business buyers as the reason for the swap. Those are the two customers a face scan is worst for.

A number this site got wrong

On August 28, VR.org reported that Beyond 2 "now starts at $899," that entry had come down $120 in four months, and that the $1,019 on Bigscreen's marketing pages was an older figure the store listing had already replaced. That was wrong. Bigscreen's own announcement puts the starting price before August 31 at $1,019, which is what this site quoted back in April and what the marketing pages were correctly still quoting in August. The $899 is a line item, not a headset you can wear. A cushion ships with every unit. The cut is real, it is $60, and it landed three days after that piece ran.

The wait went the other way

Same post, worse paragraph. Bigscreen says high demand and a delayed freight shipment have left it with very low inventory across most Beyond 2 and 2e configurations. Some orders are still going out the same day. Most will take about two weeks. The company expects to be back to one and two day shipping by September 14, and says checkout will quote a real estimate at the time of the order.

Halo Mount production restarted

The Halo Mount has been late for a long time. A first production batch went out in June. Then it stopped, and Bigscreen explained in July that a plastic part called the sledge link could break, on an estimated 2 to 5 percent of units. The company decided to remake that part in injection molded metal rather than plastic, and ate another schedule slip to do it.

Production has now resumed. Bigscreen expects the largest volume of Halo Mounts to ship in October, expects to clear the preorder backlog in November, and says it anticipates no further engineering changes or delays. From November the mount is supposed to ship out of inventory within one to two business days. It costs $180 and comes with a Universal-Fit Cushion.

Nothing here is an engineering achievement. Swapping a default cushion is a configuration decision, and a company that anticipates no further delays has anticipated that before.

The arithmetic for a buyer is what it is. $959 covers a 107 gram headset, a soft strap, a five meter fiber optic cable and the link box. It does not cover base stations, which are still yours to buy and mount on a wall. It probably does not cover delivery this week. What it does cover, for the first time, is walking up to the checkout without being asked to photograph your face first, and for anyone buying more than one of these, that is worth more than the $60.