Thoughts on the Meta Quest 3?
The release of the Meta Quest 3 seems to have been slowplayed but my take is that Zuckerberg is still going full force ahead with MR but doesn't want to have a fiasco like the last round of publicity about "the metaverse” when people were mentioning it in the same sentence as blockchains and NFTs.
I read a lot of very positive reviews about the hardware
https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset
https://www.reddit.com/r/QuestPro/comments/17631ja/24_hours_in_my_quest_3_review/
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/meta-quest-3
so I got one and I am really impressed. It comes with a very convincing demo where cracks appear in the ceiling and walls of your room opening views onto another planet and then aliens come into your room that you have to shoot with the controllers to stuff them into a tube. I am showing this demo to people on the hopes I can sell some kind of MR exhibit to a local museum.
Karl Guttag could show that the MR quality is "awful" from an eye chart perspective but the motion-to-photon is really excellent, you can throw and catch a ball just fine wearing it, and it is totally practical to walk around the house, interact with people, read (large) text to copy, use a touchscreen, etc.
I get the feeling too that they are doing many of the right things to market it, for instance, it comes with a license for a major game that comes out in two months which will might give people who don't click with it right away a chance to re-engage. There is intensive notification based marketing with discounts and stuff which is totally textbook for a new app store and that I like at the moment but it is possible it just won't connect if the product isn't up to snuff.
I tried Horizon Worlds and ran into the problem of not being able to succeed at the fishing minigame (in real life I've only been able to catch sunfish and smelt, but you really can fill up your freezer with zero skill with the later) and also the way it is weirdly empty. I have some content that I think could be put in there which I think is often a good idea on a new platform that is heavily promoted (e.g. easy to get free publicity and other benefits from the platform) but that emptiness might mean they don't feel pressure to get content. VRChat was more fun but showed me the challenge of onboarding people to that sort of thing, I got into an entrance room where I met one person who was actually attentive and trying to communicate and I think a lot of kids who were "doing their own thing", I figured out some of how to interact in that space but the problem of "getting gud" while sharing the space with other people who might be annoyed seems tough.
My take is that the software is not up to the hardware right now but as a software developer I think that’s a great problem to have.
If you're excited about Apple Vision I think you should be excited by this. Any thoughts? Anyone tried the MQ3? Anyone developing content for it?
Owned by facebook, still uninterested. The tech looks neat. I still personally am not sold on XR, the only time it would ever be appealing was if it was in sunglasses form factor. And if it's still owned by facebook at that point, I won't have fuck all to do with it.
Regardless of all of that, we still don't have high res enough displays and driving capability to do text work comfortably in VR, so I don't see a point in pushing for "productivity" things in it either yet.
I deleted my Facebook account any many other social media accounts after the 2016 election and I’m not positive on Facebook at all. For a long time I was looking from the outside in, thinking about XR applications I’d like to build and was really sure I did not want to have anything to do with Facebook.
The Apple Vision announcement appealed to me and I was thinking about getting ready to develop for it, but my Mac died and I figured I’d be better getting experience with a used Hololens 1 then spending a lot of money on.a new Mac. The software story of that was just awful and it became a white elephant. Meanwhile I kept thinking how the Apple Vision might turn out to be vaporware, might not catch on, and like space tourism, just be too expensive.
But then when it became really clear I could make the applications I wanted to make with the MQ 3 and get them in front of people, practical concerns prevailed for me so I jumped in with both feet. My take is that it might not really go in the direction Facebook seems to want to go even if they are successful in making it work as.a product (particularly if they are interested in that.). Also it seems reasonably open…. You can side load apps to it, which you’ll never be able to do with Apple Vision unless the EU or other governments force the issue.
I have a Quest 2 that I regularly use for Beat Saber, so most of my thoughts are going to be based on my experience with that.
The problem is that I think MR on the Quest 3 is going to face is going to be developer interest. Facebook hasn’t given devs much reason to be interested in their Android-based platform in the first place, and at the Quest 3’s price it’s also not going to be flying off the shelves plus in terms of onboard compute, the Quest 3 is middling at best. There’s just not much reason for devs to target it when they can instead target PC VR and have the market of the majority of Quest 1/2/3 users in addition to Rift users, Index users, etc and have access to vastly better hardware (even low end gaming PCs outgun the Quest). Personally speaking I’ve purchased almost nothing on my Quest 2 itself for similar reasons; it’s used exclusively as a tethered “dumb” PCVR headset with all games having been bought through Steam.
Some of these same things apply the the Apple Vision, but it’s targeting a bit of a different niche — it’s much closer to a general computing device that uses MR as the substrate for its UI than it is a device for MR content consumption. It also has much greater dev buy-in from day one by way of iOS developers (existing iOS apps can be adapted in “full fat” MR-enabled Vision apps with 3D UI and everything with minimal changes). This means that even if MR content use case turns out to not be popular with users, the Vision is likely to find niches for itself with a few different types of users.
I see that there is some excitement over this product, but I am unenthusiastic about it. It's good that it's less underpowered than the previous generation and has more MR-like experiences, but at the same time it's still a Meta Quest. Any useful or fun applications are going to be stuck in a walled garden controlled by an exploitative and unethical company who is famous for how deeply they invade your privacy.
I have a Rift S in my closet right now collecing dust. There's nothing really wrong with it, especially as it's a slightly more open platform than their Quest headsets, but the one thing that I find myself disappointed with the entire experience is that it's inherantly limited by reality. Roomscale VR is cool, but my legs get tired quickly in the best of situations. But the bigger problem I had with it is that most experiences don't scale down, since I don't have a lot of space to do those experiences in, so I never really feel like I'm getting the full experience.
I have a suspicion that over time VR, AR, and MR are going to be more often put in installations rather than in homes. It's really where those kinds of things can shine; where they can build virtual environments that don't have the same limitations they will have at home. In order to build a good personal use machine, it has to be glasses. It has to be available with prescription lenses as a standard feature. It has to be as light as glasses are. It has to offer the same field of view as glasses do. And at the same time they have to be somewhere around as affordable as a pair of fashion glasses. All of these things combined are not possible today, and it may not be for a very long time.
In terms of today, I don't think the Quest 3 is really supposed to be competition to Apple's Vision Pro headset. The thing I like about Vision Pro is actually their vision for how it actually fits into your life, and how it's supposed to give you a useful work environment while still leaving you open to talk to people in real life. The Quest 3, on the other hand, seems more like a way to escape from life. I don't really need VR/AR/MR to do that; video games, movies, books, and music through a good pair of headphones all do that for me already. I would rather invest in things that improve my life instead. But right now it's still a very hypothetical thing because Apple hasn't released it yet. It may not meet those expectations and I'm increasingly expecting it to be the next AirPower (i.e. never released).
The MR demos I have seen have made me enthusiastic about developing place-based experiences. That is, you could have a “Jurassic Park” experience at a paleontology museum for instance. You could make something a lot cooler than the average theme park ride which is (1) not so expensive in terms of hardware, (2) could be replaced by a different experience at the same place to maximize the hardware investment, (3) you could show the same experience at multiple sites to maximize the software investment.
If everyone has this the appeal might be limited but if it is slow to take off the window could be open for a long time.
So far as tethered goes it is an extra selling point of the MQ3 in that it is available, I could easily find a good (even better) tethered headset that costs more.
I'd have bought one based on its technical merits, if there weren't so many rumors swirling about Valve making a VR companion to the Steam Deck. I wholeheartedly support Valve's general company philosophy and will vote with my wallet regardless of how their specs (pun intended?) stack up to the competition, competition being who they are.
I just want a headset from Valve that has inside-out tracking (like the Quest or Rift S) and is in the $500 range or less. No Meta, not $1000, no external "lighthouses" to set up. If they overprice this new one like they did on the Index... I'm gonna be so mad lol. At least make a cheaper model too if they want to make a "top of the line" one again!
It looks like a really cool upgrade over the predecessors. I get low key excited over the idea of getting one, reading posts about it, watching videos, etc.
But then, I remember: Meta.
All things considered it's probably the best bang for your buck option on the market, but considering how the competition tends to be pricier, I can't help but feel uncomfortable about what Meta is going to do with my information. Are they even breaking even with the hardware sales? They must be juicing that user data for everything that's worth
I hate to take their side but...
We know what they do with the data for their legacy products: they use it to sell targeted advertising services. They must imagine they can do the same thing in VR but it is going to take advertisers being able to get them VR content. Advertisers and other publishers could use a platform like Horizon Worlds to create "objects" and "worlds" without having to learn Unity.
They send me notifications vigorously about coupon codes and applications I might buy and everything else. I appreciate the work of building a good app store and of getting people to stay engaged with the platform. I want to make the most of it so I engage, but I think their reach might exceed their grasp at the moment.
Horizon Worlds makes the bold promise that you could make friends there.
In reality Horizon Worlds dumps you in a pretty "tutorial island" with a VR fishing minigame I couldn't master (arms got tired) with some random first-time players similarly struggling with the control scheme for communications and the fishing rods and feeling too embarrassed to want to ask somebody how I'm supposed to work the fishing rod.
It's just awkward so of course I moved on. With search I instantly found a world to copy as a starter world. Even in solitude there is a lot to learn about the platform but I think it takes some practice and "getting gud" to be convivial but not make an ass of yourself and most people won't get there on that platform. Going at it with the sensibility of a Disney theme park you could make an interesting world that people would usually enjoy by themselves. Maybe just maybe I might share it with people one at a time or in small groups like an art gallery opening.
Everyone else reports it as vast and uninhabited.
At least in VRChat you will meet somebody but it could be someone who is shouting "I'm a furry! I'm a furry! I'm a furry!"
It's a step.in the right direction, I have a Quest Pro, and it is miles better than my Rift S, especially in nausea. The pancake lenses (that the quest 3 also has) are game changers. The passthrough is not quite there, but overall, the experience is really good. If the quest 3 is closer to the pro, and specs wise it appears to be, it is so much more possible to actually use the headset for hours on end. I've done some pretty wild grappling worlds in VR chat that in the rift S would have 100% made me puke without issue in it. Obviously the hardware still needs to be smaller, for mixed use to make sense, but I think reality labs isn't wrong per se, just early, but they are trying their damnedest to build a moat.
Quest 3 is very close to what I want. When looking at the demos online it looks to be decent as a TV-replacement. Especially for those shows you just put on and mostly listen.
But it's still not a monitor replacement, which will be the tipping point for me from a quality perspective. I've got a stack of cash for the first one that lets me plug in an USB-C cable to my laptop and use AR/MR/VR glasses as my only viewing device.
Currently the MQ3 would be a nice toy to play through the new Asscreed VR game and then it's just an expensive Beat Saber device. I'd rather get the PSVR2 for that.
Vision Pro looks to have the required pixel density to act as a monitor replacement, since its Mac integration projects a virtual 4k screen which is said to look about the same as a real MacBook screen. The question is if 1) the Vision Pro is capable of USB-C input and 2) if it’s possible for third party devs to develop apps to display that input.
The actual details about the Vision Pro are pretty scarce, but I think there was one that said that you can plug an USB-C wire to the charger you wear on your waist. It might be charging-only, but I'm leaning more toward it being a Thunderbolt 4 connection.
And it's an early adopter device anyway, I'm not rich enough to get one. I'll wait for the Apple Vision Regular that has all the useless bits trimmed out and just has the resolution =)
How would you watch the shows? The “apps” for Quest such as Netflix are horrible, and the browser (if it works) is limited in quality. I’m honestly surprised that the very basic concept of watching streaming shows and movies on a Meta headset is not easy as pie with high fidelity after all these years.
Peacock worked after a reboot. It's fine but would need easier to use controls (maybe egocentric sometimes instead of room centric). For instance I might curl up on the couch and want to easily put the "screen" right in front of me. I tried the MQ3 as a passenger in a car and it kept trying to locate itself in a stable location and failing but may have been usable if it switched to an egocentric mode.
I wouldn't watch something visual like Foundation on it.
More like having an almost 2 hour long YouTube analysis of 80's movies running on the periphery while I cook or do the dishes or something similar. Stuff that you mostly listen to, but still need the visuals occasionally.
Have you thought about the NReal Air or whatever that one is? I think it's whole schtick is that you can plug it into a monitor and have a virtual display. Pretty sure I read they just released a new version too
The XReal blocks your view pretty much completely, it's good for something like gaming with the the Steam Deck when on the go, less so if you want a Youtube video on the periphery of your view.
Also the XReal Air 2 Pro is 449€ the Meta Quest 3 is 569€. For that 120€ difference, I'd rather pick the Quest 3 - I can see a lot more use for it.
Virtual screens are somewhere between a tablet, computer monitor and a TV.
I think a lot of people like kguttag are pessimistic about them. Remember that we used to get our work done with 80x25 displays. A virtual screen is not going to be as good as a laptop, but with appropriate text size I think it can be completely comfortable to read email, type an email and do lighter work tasks. That is, I think traditional applications can be scaled to be workable in VR. A more interesting UX issue is control schemes: if I were going to adapt my RSS reader YOShInOn to that environment I know it would be 100% more fun if it had a game controller-like scheme than it would be with “point and click”.
It’s certainly feasible to work in a cafe w/ a Quest 3, whether anyone would want to do it as opposed to some alternative is the question and that would be some mix of traditional applications being made “good enough” as well as some new applications that would make you pack an XR device instead of a laptop.
I don’t know if I could get used to working in a setting like a cafe with something like a Quest or Vision Pro. Even with the high fidelity passthrough it feels too much I’m trying to enclose myself in a pod in an inherently quasi-social space which would be awkward.
In other settings like on a flight where there’s no expectation of social interactions and in fact self-cocooning is something of a goal I think they’d be great.
I went to Halloween party last night where that was my only costume prop. I figured that was one time when it would be socially acceptable and that it would be completely fresh this year so I didn’t waste the opportunity. (I have thought about a pass through AR “Iron Man” costume for years but it would have been a lot of work)
It got confused as a passenger in a car particularly if I looked off to the side. A dialog box offers me a chance to disable tracking but somehow I never got it to work.
At the party it was pretty dark. It did work, but I was unable to catch “fish” with a magnet — some kid said “What I like about this game is that it is so easy.”. (I fared as well at the fishing mini game at the beginning of Horizon Worlds) It was somewhat crowded and I almost stepped on a kid once.
I was able to interact with people. Once the main lights were turned on the view was a lot better.
There are some Zoom meetings I'd love to take part in using a MR headset while I'm walking around the apartment...
I'm still waiting for an apples-to-apples comparison of beat saber scores between the Q2 and Q3 from an avid player. It should be a fair stress-test of the new tracking arrangement (which is heavily biased for social hand-gestures below the shoulders) due to the widely spread arcs and insane speeds players need to make during play combined with a numeric score that's easily comparable.
Even Valve had to make some changes to their SteamVR controller max-speed limits since players were moving insanely fast for what they were expecting.
One of the problems with trying to market it as a mixed reality headset I feel comes with how goofy it looks if you're wearing it out and about. I've seen videos of people wearing them in public (during lifting and other everyday tasks) and while the tech looks impressive, it always looks really dumb when you're out and about.
I have a Quest 2 and I like the experience but I've noticed that I never took it out and had to charge it for a while every single time I wanted to use it. I was also an early adopter for the Vive. The MQ3 is definitely an exciting product though, and I hope it'll be a good alternative to Apple Vision and it's 3000$(?) price tag.
The goofiness of the wearable is a social issue that will fade over time. For example, in the 1800s and 1900s, wearing glasses in public was considered rude and goofy, but now everyone walks around with their glasses on and nobody thinks twice about it. Like any new fashion, bold changes take awhile to filter into the general populace. At Magic Leap (another MR device company), I was pushing for the company to work with fashion designers both to improve the look of the device itself and also to sponsor fashion shows where the device was part of the outfits. The purpose of the latter goal was to spur acceptance of the wearable among the fashion elite, and hasten the time when normal people come to accept it.
I think the idea of working with fashion designers is a great idea! Honestly I'd be more into it if things looked a bit more like Google Glass back in the day, even though those looked super goofy too. I do think that using passthrough cameras still adds some weird liability too, right? having something completely cover your eyes like that, if it suddenly runs out of battery or something.
The MQ3 is easy to take off so in most situations you would just take it off if it crashed. If you were doing something dangerous like driving a car or running across the street in front of traffic you might have trouble though.
The social problem I see is that people on the outside have no idea if you are in AR or VR mode. That is, you might be able to see them just fine when they approach you, or maybe you can’t see them at all and they have no way to know. Apple Vision has the fancy outer screen so people can see a representation of your eyes but that forces them to put the cameras further away from your real eyes which could hurt the AR view. A minimal viable product there might be a red or green light that indicates if you are seeing the outside world.
One neat feature the headset has is the ability to “cast” to a mobile app (and presumably other devices) so that people can see what you are seeing. I have used that when demoing XR apps, and I think for gaming it could add the the fun.
I agree, I think that having your eyes completely covered introduces some social issues that I feel kinda uncomfy with. In addition to what you've mentioned, stuff like being recorded and stuff like that (which I understand is already happening) but at least for phones and stuff I know when someone's recording me when they shove a slab in my face.
I love the cast feature on the Q2, it makes it much easier for multiple people to enjoy the VR experience at the same time, plus I really love the idea of mixed flat and vr experience games and such.
Yep, I am attracted to authoring for an environment like Horizon Worlds as I don’t need to get set up with Unity and deal with all the app store hassles but if they really want something social that has the power of Facebook somebody needs to be able to experience it from a phone or PC.
I enjoy the experience of working an upper body puppet in VRChat but the ability to join in from flat hardware is important too.
Specifically I have a lot of photography (stereograms!) and curated art that I’d like to share which would work in Horizon Worlds but I have also seen good “art galleries” made with WebGL that work in a browser that I’d be 100% proud to share. If I could author once for both platforms that would be a win.
How do you know you're in the future if people don't all go around dressed like North No. 2?
In all seriousness, though, I seriously doubt that people will be wearing this out and about; it's going to be a bunch of people stuck in rooms doing work with them, then taking them off when they're done.
I’ve walked around the house with it on to get items, set something up on the computer, etc. already.
You could certainly pack it when traveling like a laptop, even take a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and do anything you would with a computer, specifically you can make remote desktop connections. The awareness of the environment around you would be useful in situations like that, for instance someone at the office or a cafe could get your attention just as easily as in the real world if the passthrough is in and right now they have no way to know this.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the take-on-take-off during work hours, I'm talking about wearing it on train or bus, or while you're at a cafe reading through your social media feeds. I mean, you probably could do all of these things, but would you want to?
I take that as a challenge, I use an iPad to access my RSS reader on the bus, I understand I should be able to side load Tailscale and if I do that it I should be able to use YOShInOn on the go w/ the MQ 3.
Of course it competes with the iPad for that and the iPad is really good except for having the web browser run out of memory and killing the wrong tab.
And that’s the problem. It competes with other things. I live in a deep valley with no cell phone coverage which means I am one of very few mobile app developers who doesn’t own a smartphone with a plan although I have a drawer full of Android Go phones that are always uncharged when I need them. The iPad via wifi is great except for phone chauvinism in all the forms it takes, I have a Linux laptop which is great too. For the MQ3 to compete in that role it has to rise above everything else: it can run applications with an experience somewhere between a tablet, laptop and TV but will anyone care?
It would help if optimized apps were there, for instance YOShInOn would be more cool if it was scaled appropriately for MR as opposed to being just another web app. It would help if there was a killer app that made it appealing to take the headset instead of some other device.
Here is what happened when a famous VR enthusiast tried it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wkjtCuOuzE
I guess I still have time to build a Halloween costume around it but I don’t quite have the motivation…. Certainly it would be fresher this year than next year.
I hesitantly upgraded to the MQ3 from my MQ2, primarily for the higher resolution (and secondarily for an interest in the MR capabilities, which are way neater than I expected).
Casting my computer monitor to the MQ2 using Immersed was neat, and the resolution was high enough to read all but the smallest text, but everything was just blurry enough that I couldn't comfortably use it for long periods of time. The MQ3 has fixed that--the resolution is now high enough that working in Immersed is nearly as comfortable (to me) as working directly on my monitor. Of course, there's no real point right now since Immersed doesn't support extra virtual monitors on Linux, so there's no real benefit to working in VR over working directly on my monitor, but assuming Immersed (or anyone) adds Linux virtual monitor capabilities (or even floating embedded webviews) I could see myself regularly using VR for a significant portion of my work days.
As for gaming, if that were my primary interest I'd say the MQ2->MQ3 upgrade was not worth it. Visually it's a bit nicer, and the MR demo is quite neat, but until more games and apps come out that actually take advantage of them, I don't think the improvements for gaming on the MQ3 are really worth the cost if you've already got a MQ2.
As for all the Meta hate in this thread, I'm kind of in that camp myself. I have zero trust in them and I deleted my Facebook account well over a decade ago (before it was the cool thing to do). I had to "hack" my way into the MQ2 using an old version of the Oculus mobile app to even use it with my Oculus account. Thankfully they removed the Facebook account requirement before the MQ3 launched, so the account I use for the Quest is only used for the Quest. I believe (perhaps wrongly) that they can't really tie my activity in that account to anything else I do outside of the Quest, plus you can disable at least some of the telemetry if you dig through the settings. I still wouldn't use it to do anything serious or sensitive, but I can't think of anything serious or sensitive I'd want to do with the Quest right now anyway.
Since it's the only affordable standalone VR headset on the market, and I love playing around with VR, I consider Meta as a necessary evil for now. I have similar feelings toward Google but I still use and Android-based phone too.
OP and others- I have a 13 year old that wants one of these for Christmas. That’s the whole list. Just this.
Do you think this is compelling enough that he will want to use it regularly. I just can’t tell.
He’s a big gamer already, makes and edits gaming viseo content, etc. definitely a tech oriented kid, but I’m still on the fence.
I mean if there were any other things on the Christmas wish list … lol
If the kid does not experience or can get beyond the motion sickness/acclimation period (most people can, if they put a few weeks into it, but some never do), the next limiting factor is definitely stamina. For a full room scale type of user, VR will mean standing for hours, moving around, waving your arms. Very healthy and positive, but don't be mad at your kid if he just won't use it as often as other devices - it's normal. I love VR and I don't always have the stamina and mental bandwidth to do it either.
It’s hard to say.
I think the #1 disadvantage of VR against other forms of gaming is that you can easily curl up on the couch and play XBOX for 10 hours on the weekend (even if you shouldn’t) but you really can’t do that with VR.
Since I’m going at this as a software developer I am committed to playing a bit of VR a day and building up my skills and tolerance so that I know I’m going to be get good at it and eventually be ready to build apps for it.
As a gamer I have a huge backlog of Steam and XBOX games that VR games would compete with. It’s certainly true that a lot of people get a VR headset and don’t stick with it.
Maybe pick up a Quest or Quest 2 on the cheap and see if it ends up in the back of a closet in a few months?