Jack Dorsey, Who Once Compared VR to WALL-E, Calls Bigscreen Beyond 2 "Very Impressive"

Jack Dorsey posted two words on Friday morning. "very impressive," at 10:32 AM, attached to a link card reading "Bigscreen Beyond 2 | The world's smallest VR headset." By Friday evening the post had drawn 176,000 views, 916 likes and 70 reposts.

Two words is not a review. It is not an investment, a partnership, or a product announcement. What makes it worth writing down is who wrote it.

The 2023 record

In June 2023, days after Apple announced Vision Pro, Dorsey went on Breaking Points and described where he thought the category was heading. "That's the future we're driving towards, with everyone in the floating chairs, drinking their food out of straws, and constant 24/7 entertainment," he said. He raised the blobby people carted around on hovering recliners in WALL-E. He said he was "super-worried and concerned with how out-of-touch it might make people, and how it distances us even further."

Note what that objection is not. Dorsey never argued that Vision Pro's displays were bad or its price was wrong. He argued the opposite, in effect: that a headset good enough to replace your surroundings will be used to replace your surroundings. The complaint was about success, not failure.

What he pointed at

Bigscreen Beyond 2 weighs 107 grams. The body measures 143.1mm long by 52.4mm wide. It has no onboard compute, no cameras, no operating system and no battery. It is two micro-OLED panels running 2560 by 2560 per eye inside a shell that plugs into a PC over a five-meter fiber optic cable. Tracking comes from at least one SteamVR base station the buyer supplies and mounts on a wall.

Every one of those absences is the product. A Quest 3 is a computer you wear. Beyond 2 is a display you strap on and take off, 116 degrees diagonal and almost nothing on your face.

Which is a strange device to put in front of a man worried that VR is too immersive, and also the one most likely to answer him. A headset with no cameras cannot pass your room through to you. It cannot follow you out of that room either. It does one job for as long as you sit at the desk it is tethered to, and then it is 107 grams lying next to the keyboard.

The entry price moved

Beyond 2 now starts at $899. The eye-tracking model, Beyond 2e, is $1,099, and a VRChat Edition of the 2e runs $1,149. When VR.org looked at the headset in April the base configuration was $1,019, so entry has come down $120 in four months. Bigscreen's own marketing pages still carry the older figure in places. The store listing is the number that charges the card.

What a post is worth

On its own, not much. A total of 176,000 views is a rounding error against a Quest install base counted in tens of millions, and one founder's approval has never moved a hardware market.

The surrounding facts are the part that matters. Beyond 2 was already selling before Friday. In May the company cleared its entire preorder backlog and crossed 1 percent of Steam VR users, passing the HTC Vive Pro. In July, setup graphics pulled from Quest firmware put the weight target for Meta's unreleased Phoenix headset under 110 grams. The largest headset maker in the world is chasing a figure a company of roughly 40 people already ships.

For anyone actually buying, none of this changes the arithmetic. Beyond 2 still needs a gaming PC, at least one base station, and controllers for most things worth doing. It still asks for a face scan if the buyer wants the molded cushion rather than the universal one. What changed on Friday is that the argument for a headset you barely notice got made, for free, to 176,000 people, by someone who spent 2023 arguing the other way.

The endorsement costs nothing. The base stations still do.