Meta Quest 3 review: A little mixed reality makes virtual reality better

Meta Quest 3 proves that Meta Ques 2 was an incredibly good deal. When those virtual reality headsets arrived for just $300 three years ago, they were the perfect gateway to virtual reality for most people. You didn’t need to connect it to anything, you just turned it on and entered virtual reality. But then Meta raised the price to $400 last year, and the entire VR industry started to feel very outdated.

It’s no surprise that the $1,500 Meta Quest Pro completely flopped: VR was already having problems, and few people really needed something so expensive.

The $500 Quest 3 probably won’t tempt as many VR newcomers as the Quest 2, but it’s still a solid step forward for Meta. It has all the updates you would expect, and It also has full-color mixed reality cameras, allowing you to use virtual reality apps alongside a real-world view. Squint a little and you can almost see what Apple is going for with the Vision Pro (albeit with much less fidelity).

Despite all those improvements, the Quest 3 makes me marvel even more at what Meta accomplished with the Quest 2, which is still available at its original price of $299. That headset is still the best entry point to VR for newbies, although I wish it were a little cheaper now. In the meantime, the Quest 3 is the logical upgrade once you’ve caught the VR bug.

Here’s what makes it special: It’s significantly thinner and lighter than the Quest 2, thanks to a new set of pancake lenses. This also helps produce a sharper image with the new displays, which offer 2,064 by 2,208 pixels per eye. That’s even better than the PlayStation VR 2, which wowed us earlier this year.

The Quest 3 also runs Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip, which offers twice the GPU power of the Quest 2, according to Meta. On the front, there are two full-color cameras for mixed reality, along with a depth sensor in the middle to help map your space and avoid obstacles. That’s notable, as it was a feature that Meta removed entirely from the Quest Pro. When it comes to storage, you can choose between the 128GB model for $500 and a 512GB option for $650.

Now, what the Quest 3 doesn’t have: there’s no face or eye tracking, nor cameras on the controllers like the Quest Pro. However, at least they’ve lost the annoying rings on the Quest 2 gamepads. I don’t think you’ll miss any of them. Quest Pro’s features are potentially interesting, but the developers haven’t really taken advantage of them.

Meta has already proven that it can make a solid, standalone VR headset, but can it really bring mixed reality to everyone? That seems to be the driving force behind the Quest 3. Apple’s Vision Pro showed us a genuinely promising vision of spatial computing, one in which the digital and physical worlds can comfortably coexist. But that also costs $3,499. Trying to achieve something similar for a fraction of the price seems impossible.

The Quest 3’s attempt at mixed reality is far from perfect: the color cameras offer a blurry, pixelated view of the world, as if you’re in a drug-fueled haze. But it’s still quite useful. A double tap on the side of the Quest 3 is all you need to switch between immersive virtual reality and the real world.

That’s something I ended up using frequently to check texts and Slack messages, get information from my computer, and chat with people around me. Doing any of those things in the past would have required completely removing the headphones or raising the visor.

Quest 3 also goes beyond letting you see the real world: you can also do some basic mixed reality multitasking. You can organize up to three windowed Quest apps, such as WhatsApp and Quest Store, in a translucent virtual tray that sits in front of you. Even better, you can move that tray anywhere in your space. That’s not something I would use a lot, but the fact that could Creating this environment, anchoring it to a specific point in the real world, and walking around it just blew me away.

It also helps that the Quest 3 makes every virtual element look incredibly sharp. Watching WhatsApp chats on the headset was no different than on my gaming monitor. However, Meta still has some work to do to make the Quest apps more useful: she could only respond to WhatsApp chats by awkwardly tapping on the Quest’s virtual keyboard, leaving voicemails, or attaching media from the headset. (We hope that virtual table keyboard that Mark Zuckerberg showed becomes reality).

Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

The Quest 3 also marks the first time I’ve really enjoyed using Meta’s finger tracking. It was an intriguing feature when it came to the original Quest, but it wasn’t always accurate, so I preferred to use the Quest’s controllers. Now, thanks to the depth sensor and full-color cameras, the Quest 3 does a much better job of recognizing every finger gesture. I found myself letting my controllers rest much more often, as it was so easy to navigate apps by swiping and pointing virtually.

Now, given how well the Quest 2 excelled as a standalone VR headset, I wasn’t too surprised that the Quest 3 was even better. Everything loaded faster thanks to its larger RAM. The controllers seemed much more precise, especially for games that demanded precision, like the next one. Friend’s Samba and the pillar of virtual reality Beat saber.

The Quest 3’s higher-resolution screen also makes games look much better than the Quest 2, but I was more impressed by the few titles that were optimized for its faster hardware. Red matter 2 It practically looked like a full-fledged PC VR title, thanks to its incredibly detailed textures and character models. The Kurzgesagt game, Out of scaleIt made me feel like I was living inside one of his gorgeous animated YouTube videos.

Quest 3 owners will still have access to the hundreds of games that also work on the Quest 2, but it’s nice to see some new titles arriving along with new hardware. It doesn’t look like anything will be exclusive to Quest 3 yet, but that could easily change in the future. For now, I expect the new games to have an extra layer of polish, while the Quest 2 will get a more basic experience.

I couldn’t try First meetingsthe Quest 3 mixed reality walkthrough that was shown during our initial preview, but I hope more developers start creating similar experiences for the Quest 3. There are already a handful of truly “mixed reality” titles, such as black zombies and Figmin XR, but they’re mostly interesting experiments rather than anything truly innovative. There’s room for the Quest 3 to deliver the kind of reality-altering experiences that devices like Magic Leap and HoloLens initially promised.

After testing the Quest 3 for a week, I noticed something surprising: It’s the first headset that doesn’t make me feel trapped while using it. Since the real world is easily accessible, I feel much more comfortable sitting back and enjoying a movie on Netflix or a 360-degree video on YouTube. And thanks to its lighter frame and extra space for glasses, I can also play VR games for much longer than before.

I just wish the Quest 3’s battery life lasted longer. Depending on what you’re doing, it can last two to three hours, just like the Quest 2. However, at least you can still use it while charging the headset, and it also stays on when connected to a PC for more intense experiences. as Google Earth VR.

If you’ve seen my PlayStation VR 2 review, you’ll know that I’m pretty ambivalent about the state of virtual reality at the moment. Headphones are getting better, but gaming and the industry just feel stagnant. The Meta Quest 3, at the very least, seems like a better option for VR newcomers than the $550 PlayStation VR 2. It’s expensive, but offers solid VR without a PlayStation 5. While it’s not a Vision Pro, The Quest 3’s bet is mixed. reality makes it a headset you’ll likely use long after your VR honeymoon is over.

And if a $500 headset is too expensive, I’m sure you can find a used Quest 2 for a bargain.