Meta Quest 3 Review

It’s easy to forget that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:virtual reality first entered the mainstream less than a decade ago. We didn’t see the commercial release of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift until 2016, and the rate at which they’ve advanced and improved has been dizzying. Six degrees of freedom, inside-out tracking, haptic feedback, hand and body traꦉcking, on-board computing, the headsets of today are ne🥃arly indistinguishable from just seven years ago.

Meta Quest 3 was meant to be the next step forward for VR, but, three years on from the Quest 2, it feels like Meta’s VR offerings have hit a wall. With most of its defining features still months away and not making the initial release, Meta Quest 3 is left feeling more like a hardware refresh of its predecessor than the next generation for virt🦄ual reality.

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The first thing you’ll notice about the Quest 3 is its size. The whole kit has been tweaked from the Quest 2 to focus more on ergonomics. It isn’t much lighter – only about 15 grams –, but the headset itself is slimmer, with most of its bulk residing in the area where your face goes. With a smaller profile, the weight is better distributed around your head, and it feels far less like you’ve sticky taped a computer to your face than before. This is great for hig🐻h-speed games, as fast movements now don’t jiggle the headset around anywhere near as much and lead to an awkward screen door effect or a constant need to adjust the headset in the middle of longer ♉sessions.

The Touch Plus controllers have also been reworked to be less cumbersome, largely thanks to the removal of the big tracking rings present in past iterations. It was always so easy to crack them together in a particularly frantic Beat Saber 🍸session. Now that they’re gone, you can hold them closer together for finer motor control. Again, it isn’t a massive overhaul, but an ergonomic consideration that is v🃏ery much appreciated.

The unchanged head strap is considerably less appreciated. While everything else from the Quest 2 has been tweaked and resized for comfort and innovation, Meta decided the thing that received the most criticism is perfectly fine to bring back completely untouched. It’s still a weird pulley system of elastic straps and Velcro, and an utt🙈er nightmare to adjust if anybody else wants to give VR a whirl. It’s fiddly, uncomfortable, and puts too much pressure on your eyebrows to the point where it can become painful to play without precise adjustments.

Stronger improvements are found inside the visor. Even its cheaper offering at £479.99 has more storage than the base Quest 2 (128GB versus 64GB), le♌tting you store far more games and applications. It’s got more DRAM, 4K resolution on each eye, a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor, and a larger field of view (with mechanical IPD adjustment) that finally gets rid of the ‘looking at the world through two toilet tubes’ vibes that plagued the Quest lineup for years. The end result is a snappier, more immersive experience with nice, smooth performance to combat the dreaded ‘simulation sickness’ that comes with every judder or stutter. If there’s any reason right now to upgrade to a Quest 3, it’s going to be this impressive technical boost.

In terms of software, Quest 3 is pretty much identical to its predecessor. All your games will still be compatible, and you get features added to the Quest 2 over time, like hand tracking and Air Link for wireless PC play, right out of the box. Most of the Quest 3’s new features tie into its push for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:mixed-reality, and, 🐷when it works, it’s absolutely incredible.

The glorified tutorial game that comes baked into the Quest 3 sees your room invaded by fluffy aliens, as you try and shoot them, match their colours, and make combos Puyo-Puyo style. Seeing the walls of my room crumble away in the gunfight, and having aliens realistically duck and weave around my fu🌃rniture brought back that signature VR magic, the novelty and fun you only get from those first few times you pop on a headset and experience the wonder of its technology for the very first time. Quest 3 manages to capture this well.

Except that leads into the device’s single biggest problem: it’s not done yet. Most of its primary selling points aren’t available yet, and won’t be for a few months at least. The mixed reality is great, but it’s missing the dynamic occlusion that hides virtual elements whenever your body would normally cover them up, taking you out of the experience. Placing virtual objects in the world around you is also scheduled for 2024, and the torso tracking and “🃏AI-estimated legs” that Meta has made a big deal of are still a while off too.

Even the launch lineup of games is sparse, with not very many titles actually making use of what the Quest 3 has to offer. Assassin’s Creed Nexus, Ghostbusters: Ride of the Ghost Lord, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Arizona Sunshine 2, Asgard’s Wrath 2, Powerwash Simulato𓆏r VR, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice are all scheduled to launch by the end of the year. Until then, you’ve got Quest 2 games and productivity apps to keep you going.

The leap from the Rift to the Rift S, or from the Rift S to the Quest 2 were monumental 🍰steps forward for VR. In the same amount of time, the jump from the Quest 2 to the Quest 3 feels far less impressive. There is potential for sure; its mixed reality is enthralling, and the improved ergonomics make it less of a chore to set up and play. But right now, you’d effectively be buying a Quest 2.5 with an IOU from Meta to add the features and games later on. For around £500, that is an 🗹incredibly hard sell. I’d recommended you wait for the big hits to arrive alongside its delayed features before taking the plunge.