Five steps from a monitor to a headset, and the fixes when one of them fails
Start your VR runtime, open this site in desktop Chrome, open Settings, choose the VR section and press Enter VR. That is the whole procedure for a PC VR headset, and the rest of this page is what each step assumes, what the controllers do once you are in, and the three things that stop it working. It applies to headsets driven by SteamVR or another OpenXR runtime on a PC; a standalone Quest running from its own browser is not supported yet.
Open the gameWhat Counter-Strike VR is, and which route fits your headsetThe browser does not talk to your headset directly. It asks whichever OpenXR runtime is active on the PC, and SteamVR is the common one. So start SteamVR (or your headset vendor's runtime, if that is what you use for other PC VR games) and wait until it reports the headset and both controllers as ready. Doing this first matters because the game checks for VR support once, when the page loads: a runtime started afterwards can leave the Enter VR button hidden until you reload.
Go to the play page in Chrome on the same PC. Desktop Chrome on Windows with SteamVR is the combination we have tested. The game loads exactly as it does for flat play, on your monitor, and you can join a server or start a bot match before or after entering VR; it does not matter which order.
Open Settings from the main menu and choose the VR section. The first item is the Enter VR button. If you cannot see it, the browser has reported that no VR runtime is available, which is step 1 or step 5. Press it. The headset takes over, the monitor stops being the game's screen, and the HUD and menus you are used to appear as panels floating in front of you.
The same button now reads Exit VR, and pressing it hands the game back to the monitor. Opening the runtime's own dashboard (the SteamVR menu) pauses the game safely and resumes it when you close the dashboard; nothing stays pressed across that gap.
With the default right-handed layout, the right trigger fires and the right grip reloads. Pressing the right thumbstick in is the secondary action, which is the scope on a rifle and the silencer on pistols that have one, and flicking that stick up or down cycles to the previous or next weapon; left and right on it turn you. On the left controller the trigger is use, which also opens the buy menu, and the grip is push-to-talk. The face buttons are crouch on A, jump on B, drop weapon on X and the scoreboard on Y.
Pressing the left thumbstick in recentres the view, so if the game's forward drifts from your real forward, that is the fix, and it is worth pressing once at the start of every session. Every one of these bindings can be changed in the same VR settings section, and the whole layout mirrors when you switch to left-handed.
Turning defaults to snap turning in 45-degree steps, and that is deliberate: smooth turning is the single most common cause of feeling unwell in a VR shooter for people new to it. Leave snap on for the first session. Walking follows your head direction by default, which means you can look around while moving without changing course; switching it to follow the off-hand controller suits people who like to look one way and move another.
If the frame rate stutters, lower the render scale a step. It runs from 0.7 to 1.5 times the headset's native resolution per eye, applies the next time you press Enter VR, and dropping from 1.0 to 0.85 removes roughly a quarter of the pixels the graphics card has to draw each frame.
There are three causes and they are easy to tell apart. If the button is missing entirely, the browser could not find a VR runtime when the page loaded: check that the runtime is running and the headset is awake, then reload the tab. If the button is there but pressing it flashes and returns you to the menu, the runtime refused the session, and the usual reason is another VR application already holding the headset; close it and try again. If the page reloads itself on the first press, you are on a PC with two graphics adapters, where the browser has to recreate its drawing context for VR. The reload is expected, happens once, and the second press starts the session.
A headset that works in other PC VR games but shows nothing here is worth reporting, because everything above the runtime is the same for every headset and the difference will be in the runtime's OpenXR support.
Chrome's Immersive Web Emulator extension pretends to be a headset and two controllers, and the game accepts it. The picture arrives on your monitor as two eye views and the controllers are moved with the mouse, so it is a way to see the menus, the panels and the weapon handling before you own a headset, or to check that the Enter VR button appears on your PC at all. It is a preview rather than a way to play a round.
It does not run on a standalone Quest from the headset's own browser, and it does not yet apply to Sven Co-op. While a VR session is running the page cannot take screenshots, because the headset's picture is not readable from the browser. And it does not need anything installed, so there is no uninstall either: leaving VR is the Exit VR button, and closing the tab ends the session.