Summary
- The Quest 3's mixed reality features, including full color passthrough, provide an impressive and revelatory experience, showcasing the potential for mixed reality technology.
- The Quest 3's passthrough technology is currently dark, grainy, and distorted, falling short of a true-to-life image.
- Despite the poor image quality of the passthrough, the addition of virtual elements in games like First Encounters can easily make you ignore the limitations, resulting in an immersive experience.
When the Quest 3 was revea🌼led during Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Connect keynote late last month, I wrote that the new mixed reality features alone would make it worth the $500 upgrade. I received my headset in the mail earlier today, and boy, I can’t tell you how good it feels to be right. Experiencing the full color passthrough in the Quest 3’s First Encounters demo was as impressive and revelatory as the first time I experienced VR on the Rift S. There’s not much to it, but it provides enough of an ‘aha’ moment that it’s easy to see where mixed reality can go from here, and I can’t wait.
I don’t mean to oversell &nd🎀ash; this is just the beginning for mainstream mixed reality. Enterprise headsets like the Magic Leap 2 have been working on this technology for many years with the help of studios like Insomniac, but at $500 the Que🍌st 3 is the first consumer grade XR headset, and its immaturity shows. Unlike the demonstration from Meta Connect that suggested a true-to-life image, the Quest 3’s passthrough is dark, grainy, and massively distorted.
Meta Quest 3 ꦯReview – Virtually▨ The Same As Before
The Meta Quest 3 reignites the magic of virtual reality, buꦉt it isn't much more than a fancier Quest 2 at the moment.
The edge of objects ripple when you stare at them, and moving your head causes a ripple effect around you as the headsets' six outward-facing cameras all work together to stitch together an image of the world around you. I imagine this is what reality would look like if you were trapped inside a CRT television. The technology has a long way to go before it approximates anything even remotely close to what your eyes naturally see.
That said, Iꩵ found the poor image quality surprisingly easily to ignore once the virtual elements were added in. When you first launch First Encounters, which comes preloaded on every Quest 3, you’ll be asked to create a map of your room - or rather, help the headset create a map for you. All you have to do is look around, and the Quest 3 will automatically create a geometric mesh that covers every surface in your room. The floor, ceiling, walls, and all my furniture were instantly mapped to create my place space, which was a bit of a trip to watch. In the end you’re given the opportunity to outline each pieceಞ of furniture for even better accuracy, which is as simple as pointing at each corner of the object and giving it a label. The entire process took less than two minutes.
First Encounters wastes no time blowing your mind. As soon as I hit play, a spaceship crashed through my ceiling and landed gently on my bed, leaving a hole in my vaulted ceiling that blended perfectly. I could walk all around the rocket and look closely at its details as it settled onto my bed. Were it not for the controllers in my hand I ma🌟y have i🍎nstinctively reached out to try and touch it. The grainy image of my actual room faded into the periphery the second the actual video game started.
Then a bunch of aliens started bursting through the walls. Don’t worry, they’re the cute fluffy kind, like tribbles from Star Trek. As they broke down my dry wall I could see that outside my room was an alien planet inhabited by dozens of tiny aliens jumping around and threatening to invade my space. A gun appeared and I started shooting, which apparently is a natural instinct I’ve developed from yeaꦯrs of gaming.
Part of what’s so impressive about First Encounters is how well the aliens are occluded. I have a big L-shaped desk in my room, and I had to walk around it to find the little puff ball invading from the north wall. They ꧒jumped up onꦕ the desk, on my bed, and on my other desk (game journalist secret: we all have two desks) and they always fit naturally into the physical environment. If I held up my hand I could still see them through it - dynamic occlusion is a feature slated for later this year - but otherwise I had no problem believing what I was seeing. As their numbers increased, it actually felt like my room was getting swarmed by the creatures, which made running around and shooting them even more exciting.
I took a tour of the other mixed reality apps on the Quest 3, and while there’s a good number of productivity and creativity options, the games, for now, are severely limited. Some older games have received passthrough updates, with mixed results, but there’s only a small handful ✱of options until later this year when Lego Bricktales, Samba de Amigo, and Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord launch.
I know better than to get too excited about a tech demo. I remember when The Playroom convinced me that the PlayStation Camera was the next big thing. Remember how the astro bots would rattle around inside the Dualshock 4 when you tilted it? Do you remember any ot♏her games using all that cool tech in innovative ways? Mixed reality will only evolve if developers invest in it, but this is a promising start that makes me very excited for the future of the Quest 3.