Meta Quest 3 - A normal guy’s review
I used the Quest 3 almost daily for a month before I returned it.
The Zuck strikes again! After 4 years, the Quest 2 finally has a successor. By all accounts it is an upgrade, but at $500, is it worthwhile?
Let’s start with some of the good things:
The new lenses are much better, and the return of the IPD (inter-pupilary distance) slider to get the correct IPD and the new pancake lenses means the sweet spot for clarity is much, much larger. The headset is also significantly smaller than the Quest 2, but a little heavier at 18.2oz (a little over 1lbs). It’s a comfortable headset to wear, and the new strap is nice, if not a little basic. I still wish that Meta would pair the Elite strap that they sell separately as part of the headset, as straps like the Elite balance the whole thing out better. Some cases third party companies even make straps that have an extra battery on it, which is something this headset is in dire need of.
Another cool thing is the Mixed Reality stuff. I think this is a feature that will get better with time, as most of the apps that utilize the MR features of this headset are pretty basic, like the demo game that comes preinstalled that lets you shoot aliens behind your walls. I think there is a lot of space for this market to grow, but if you are hoping to get this to jump into a world of mixed reality, you’ll have to keep waiting.
And now the bad.
The battery life on this headset is insanely short. I would get the charging alert after just 1.5 hours of playing the new Assassin’s Creed: Nexus game. My Quest 2, comparatively, gets about 2.25 hours before telling me to charge while playing the same game. This is a huge bummer given how expensive this thing it.
One of the biggest marketing factor of this is the color passthrough, which is like AirPods Transparency mode, but for your eyeballs. It’s good, but not good enough. In my testing, I never found myself preferring the passthrough instead of just taking the headset off to do something. You can see your phone screen through it but it’s not great. Lots of folks online are wearing it while doing the dishes and watching a video, or some other permutation of that, but I don’t feel like that is $500 better than just propping my phone up on the window sill above my sink. Another issue is that the closer that things get to the edges of the cameras, the more warped they become. This happens because the cameras on the headset are all filming concurrently and then the headset is splicing those videos together to make one big video in real time. This is technologically very cool, but it still leaves much to be desired.
Overall:
I ended up returning the Quest 3 and keeping my Quest 2. As a non-diehard VR consumer, $500 for better lenses and more functional passthrough just wasn’t worth it for me. As an upgrade, I would wait until its cheaper, but if you are getting into VR for the first time I would probably recommend the Quest 3 just for longevity. It’s not a bad headset at all, I just feel like this headset still doesn’t have a killer app that the product category needs. I can watch YouTube videos on it, but the resolution still isn’t good enough that I prefer that over my TV, iPhone, or iPad. You can do lots of things in VR, but very few of them are better than the alternative. Even with Assassin’s Creed: Nexus, which is the best VR game I’ve ever played, I still find the experience of roaming Venice better on my Xbox with 2009’s Assassin’s Creed II (the same characters and settings aer shared between AC2 and ACNexus). I like to say that VR feels like a solution on the hunt for a problem, and so far, I think the Quest 3 continues that trend. In a world with hyper advanced headsets, we need hyper advanced things to do with them. I hope to see more development in this field and to one day eat my words on VR. But not today!