It’s Easy To Mod Your Oculus VR Headset With Prescription Lenses

The Oculus brand VR headset and other similar devices allow you to view 3D worlds, but they can be blurry and unsatisfying if you’re a glasses wearer. Alternatively, you might be able to see fine, but find your glasses get in the way of a comfortable experience. Either way, you might want to integrate prescription lenses into your headset, and thankfully, there’s a straightforward way to do so thanks to [tanvach].

The way to do so is by using these 3D-printed lens adaptors. They take standard single vision lenses as designed for the Zenni #550021 round glasses frames, and let them fit nicely inside a Oculus Quest, Quest 2, or Rift S headset. [tanvach] supplies instructions on how to order the lenses for your own prescription, and notes that the key is to get the antireflective coating to reduce glare. And, if you don’t want to print your own adapters, you can source some pre-printed instead!

The adapters are a great way to improve your VR experience if you’re someone that typically relies on corrective lenses. Of course, it’s getting more popular to simply DIY your own headset these days, too. If you’ve got your own neat VR project in the works, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!

33 thoughts on “It’s Easy To Mod Your Oculus VR Headset With Prescription Lenses

  1. Superb work. I’d never really thought to do this before, i’ve never really bothered with VR due to needing glasses – thankyou Tanvach, you’ve now started me down a VR rabbit hole :-)

    1. I picked up a HP Reverb to fly around in Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 and the biggest problem I had with my prescription is that they are bi-focal lenses. I ended up finding a company that makes an adapter and the lens, with just distance, and it’s been a game changer using it. Now I spend way too much time flying around.

      1. My glasses fit nice, but tight under the quest 1. But it nearly hurts trying to wear them under the quest 2 Headset, making it practically unusabel. This idea could really save my passion for VR

  2. Note that it’s not a good idea if you have astigmatism. Round glasses can rotate and since astigmatism have a particular angle to correct you won’t have the adequate correction anymore.

    1. omfg I’ve had a pair of 550021 for YEARS and thought Zenni screwed up the right side so I stuffed them in a drawer. I just pulled them back out and rotated the lens and it’s PERFECT! Thank you internet stranger!

    1. Such as the reflection of your eye, or a reflection of the light from the display bouncing off your eye, causing light to follow a path other than from the display, properly through the modded lens, through the cornea, pupil, and lens imaging perfectly on the retina? If only there was a word for the reflection causing light to follow a path other than the perfect one inside an optical device.

      >:(

  3. I’ve been doing this for years for microscope & telescope eyepieces, monoculars and magnifier headsets. Works great, and Zenni is a nice resource.

    Astigmatism? pfft. Just rotate the thing until it looks better. OK for eyepieces, but yeah, lock them down for a headset application. Better use round lenses so you can do that.

  4. I bought a pair of lens adapters from eBay last year, one of the best things I every got for my Q2 (along with a decent headstrap), only cost £6 for the adaptors, and £30 for the glasses to take the lenses from. If you wear glasses, absolutely get a pair of these!!! Massively Massively recommended.

  5. Dumb question, why not just leave them in the frames (sans ear pieces) and have a few clips to hold them in place?

    Then it could even be a quick swap for multiple users with the same headset.

    The source of glasses is pretty smart though, I’ve had good experiences with Zenni

    1. The company I found to get my prescription inserts for my Reverb are just a 3d printed “clip” (lack of a better term) that snaps over the eyes with magnets in them. The glasses themselves are marked “L” & “R” and just fit right onto the “clip”. The glasses can be removed and then a person can use them if they don’t need glasses. It’s been great as using my “normal” glasses are not an option as they are bi-focal and when using a VR headset, you just want the distance vision prescription.

  6. Hah! I’ve done the same thing with a vintage View-Master. I cut down an old pair of lenses with a Dremel, then carefully glued them inside. No 3D printing required! (I put a note on the viewer for the next person who owns it, stating that the focus will very likely not work for them…)

  7. Go to the dollar store and buy a few pairs of reading glasses with the prescription you want, and then grind then into the shape you want. The lenses grind easy, they are cheap, and you get instant gratification. If, like me, your vision is fine past 3 feet and you only suffer from presbyopia, you probably have a few broken ones laying around already.

  8. Every pair of binoculars I’ve seen can adjust over a wide range and always have an offset for different eyes as well as inter pupil distance. What a joke to not do this for any optical device. ADA!

  9. Sadly it’s nearly impossible for me. I don’t want to know how thick and how expensive the prescription lenses might be for my eyes since I have about -8 and -8.5 Dioptrien. Even my normal glasses cost hundreds of € and and partly over 1cm thick.

    And I have an index but that’s not my point here.

    1. I have about the same Rx as you do. I am wanting to find a better fix as well for myself. What I currently do is wear an old pair of glasses that are shaped a lot smaller than my current ones. They barely fit correctly, I have to move the headset / glasses around a few times. Then they always get stuck in the headset when I am done playing. It’s definitely an inconvenience. Here’s the weird thing, I was first introduced to Oculus VR thing via RIFT Now Idk why but I didn’t have my glasses on at all and I played a boxing game. I could see perfectly clear the entire time……WHY 🤔 it’s not NOT that way with QUEST.

  10. As an optician I strongly recommend against hacking together something with prescription lenses.
    There are a quite some professional options out there and even the worst one of them will be better than this DIY solution.

    Get an incomplete list here:
    Top of the line:
    VR Lens Lab
    VR Optician
    Others:
    Adlens
    VR-Wave
    Reloptix
    VR-Rock
    HonsVR

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