Want to improve your shooting skills at home? AceXR VR handgun training is making that a reality.
If becoming an excellent shooter is the destination, then dry fire is the road to get there. Ask anyone from USPSA Grand Masters to tier 1 operators to premier firearm instructors, and it’s universally agreed that dry fire is critical to growing as a shooter.
And while a Ben Stoeger book of dry-fire drills and some paper targets will take you far, what if we could improve the experience with the help of technology?
Virtual reality hasn’t taken over the world like it promised it would 10 years ago, but using it to enhance and maximize the potential of dry fire is a revolutionary feat that AceXR is leading.
Basics
The short and sweet of it is that AceXR is a VR app and a realistic handset that puts you on a virtual range. It’s as close as you can get to being on the shooting range without actually putting on your pants, getting in the truck and going to one.
On the ‘Range’
Ace has a pretty impressive set of drills and stages set up—and is adding more every couple of weeks. There are classics like Bill Drills, 22422 and Two One Two One, and a few dozen new drills made by Ace or submitted from groups and trainers from across the nation. One of my favorite drills is Briefcase, based on the Tom Cruise movie Collateral (2004). If you haven’t seen the movie, do yourself a favor and watch it tonight. It might not be a very practical drill, but it’s fun.
While more is better, there is enough content in the “game” to keep you drilling and finding new things to push and do better. Custom stages designed by Ace or USPSA make up the bulk of the options, plus the complete set of Steel Challenge stages.
On top of that, there is the constant allure of just doing better, going faster and getting a higher score. It’s a player cycle that has been in place since Pong because it works. While the video game elements help with the dopamine rush and keep you coming back for more, Ace is a training program—not a game. Mostly.
There are a few video game elements in Ace that aren’t perfect, but they don’t present a real obstacle either. While the game starts with one free in-game pistol and free in-game optic unlock, unlocking more costs an in-game currency (Brass) that can only be earned by completing drills, daily drills and weekly series drills.
Because you don’t really need to unlock more guns since it’s just cosmetic—and Ace provides enough Brass to keep you swimming in it after a session or two—it doesn’t really impact anything.
For targets, Ace has almost everything. Paper targets in just about all the flavors, plus a standard array of steel targets, and steel that you don’t always see at most ranges, like Texas Stars and Polish Plate Racks. Those last two are pretty awesome in VR because they reset with a push of a button and you can do rep after rep on them to discover the best ways of beating them.
I’ve gotten to shoot a fair number of real Texas Stars and Polish Plate Racks, and the realism is pretty spot on. Not perfect, but really close.
Multiplayer
Something you might enjoy is the ability to join another player’s game or have them join yours. It’s a VR range day. Personally, this mode isn’t for me. There is a solid community of players on Discord who meet up regularly, and Ace hosts regular meetups as well if you’re looking for friends to play with.
The technical difficulties grow when trying to use the multiplayer, but that’s the nature of the beast right now.
Bigger Is Better
Most of my time with the Ace app has been using a fairly stationary method of dry fire since this allows me to do it in about a 5×5-foot square space in my living room. For my setup, nothing needed to move, and it’s easy to just throw on and get some reps in.
But if you have access to a larger space, like an empty garage or even a backyard, AceXR also offers complete stages—including many stages that were part of USPSA Nationals.
These are simply incredible. Full movement of a real stage, but zero reset and no brass to pick up. Just be really careful to make sure your space is clear, safe and your Meta Quest boundaries are set up correctly.
Running complete USPSA stages in the backyard is insanely fun.
Tangible Improvements
For pistol shooting, there are two major areas that have always been difficult for me, and they both involve speed. My draw is slow, and my shooting is slower overall. Extremely accurate, but slower than it should be. For a little over a year, speeding up has been my main goal, and while progress has been made, it has been incremental.
In-person classes with Baer Solutions and BRVO Tactical have helped push my rifle speed up dramatically, but my pistol still lags behind.
In June 2024, my draw from buzzer to first shot at 7 yards was about 1.8 seconds. A year of normal dry fire and focusing on my draw at least once a week, plus a 35-day stretch dedicated to draw practice, got me down to 1.5 seconds. Not horrible, but not elite either.
Two weeks of AceXR and my draw-to-first-shot time was down to 1.1 seconds most of the time. And this wasn’t dedicated practice; it just happened. Hitting the real range and doing some live-fire drills, the times remained the same: 1.1-ish when pushing it and 1.2 reliably. Tenths of a second might not sound like a lot, but if you know, you know how much of a real improvement this actually is.
Transitions have improved dramatically, also as evidenced by cutting seconds off my times in the Ace drills and hitting the range to see if it translated to live fire. There is no doubt that time spent with the Ace system has helped improve my shooting, and that it helped more than normal dry fire alone.
Cost and Value
I’ll give you the number and then break it down; you’re looking at $650 to $700 (as of August 2025) to your door for a headset, handset and membership. Google for a coupon code and finding 10 percent off isn’t hard, or 20 percent off if you’re military or first responder.
The largest potential cost is a VR headset, but the rest of the gear isn’t cheap either. For the headset, you have three options: Meta Quest 2, 3S and 3. The Meta Quest 2 isn’t in production, but you can find used ones for about $200 or less. Not recommended, but doable.
Currently supported by Meta are the Quest 3 and 3S. A Quest 3 runs $500 but has much better resolution and more storage. If you want to use this for actual gaming on top of Ace, it might be worth it.
Otherwise, the Quest 3S is the trimmed-down version at $300. Offering less storage and less resolution, the 3S is the budget headset—but it works. Mine came via a Verizon promotion, and it seems these promotions are floating around for a number of things like cable, cell phones, internet, etc.
The Ace handset is $200 to start with. “To start with” because it’s likely that you’ll end up spending more if you really want to 1:1 the handset to your main pistol. There is a robust 3D printing community within the Ace community, and a number of aftermarket handsets and mods that you can get from unofficial sources or print yourself. But the tech that makes it all work is the Ace FCU, and those only come in official Ace handsets, and that will run you $200.
And then there is the monthly or yearly Ace membership: $19 per month or $168 a year. A lot of people don’t want one more subscription in their lives, but the Ace team is constantly updating the app and adding content. In my book, this is well worth it.
If you get a yearlong membership, handset, and Meta Quest 3S bundle deal from AceXR, you’re out the door for $650 plus shipping/tax. That isn’t cheap, especially when normal dry fire is free—right?
Think of it this way: Don’t look at Ace as dry fire, look at it as a training cost. Given the choice of two in-person training classes this year or one class and an Ace setup, the Ace system is a better value. Going forward, the yearly membership isn’t that bad if you look at it like a private range membership.
While it doesn’t lower the cost, reframing how you think about it helps make it make more sense.
If you put the time and effort into practicing with the Ace system, the gains speak for themselves.
Holster Up
Again, it depends on how much you want to make your Ace handset match your real pistol—but there are potential added costs. First is a holster. The Ace handset might fit a race holster, but most other holsters won’t fit without some modifications. Ace sells holsters designed for the handsets, as does a few other brands like Double Alpha, Black Rhino and FPS Holsters. All of these run $70 to $80.
My holster was actually just an old Dara holster that isn’t used anymore and modified using a Dremel.
IT Support
The Ace app is surprisingly stable and smooth but isn’t free from all bugs—though that has more to do with Meta than they are with Ace itself.
As a lifelong gamer and computer guy, it doesn’t frustrate me when computers don’t work, and I solve my own problems 99 percent of the time. So far, nothing has come up that couldn’t be fixed with just turning either the Ace app or the Meta headset off and back on, but it comes up regularly.
Setting up the Meta headset and making an account, etc. was the most annoying part of the experience, simply because it’s Meta. Getting Meta to play nicely with my WiFi was also a surprisingly strange problem that took an hour of resetting and downloading patches.
Every five or six times Ace launches, it needs to be closed and reopened because it stalls on boot, or the floor doesn’t load at the right height or the Drills are “temporarily unavailable” for no reason.
This is honestly not really much of a problem; it’s 10 seconds wasted for every six or seven hours of use. But if you’re the kind of person who expects everything to work perfectly every time you touch it, you might need to adjust your expectations.
Once the app is launched and you’re actively using it, it’s almost always problem-free. In almost 30 hours of use, it has only crashed twice, where the app just closed for no reason. I’ve played a lot of AAA games with worse performance, so that ain’t bad.
Loose Rounds
I’m a big believer in the AceXR system now and highly recommend it if you’re able to take advantage of it and you want to improve as a shooter.
It’s not a cheap investment, but it’s definitely worth it in my book. Dry fire might be “free”, but training isn’t. AceXR is training.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.
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