Meta has sold just shy of 20 million of
their Quest 2 headsets. To put that number in perspective, that is about
half as many as Sony has sold of the PlayStation 5, but it's a VR headset,
not a living room gaming console. And if you're asking, hey, is the Quest 3 an
improvement over the Quest 2? The answer is, yeah, it is. But you're also asking
the wrong question. What you should be asking is how is it that Meta has
managed to lose 47 billion dollar while
being the most successful VR headset maker by a country mile. The answer of
course is research and development. Some of which is still locked away in a lab
somewhere, but some of which is finally seeing the light of day in the form of
the Quest 3, or at least the simulated
light of day. Welcome to augmented
reality. This is incredible. Look at this. It's
like there's a real chair right in the middle of the room. Like I Oh, that's a
real chair. Okay, this is not the demo. We'll show you the demo. There's still a
long way to go and we're going to talk about that. But when I put on the Quest
3 for the first time, it marked, pun intended, the moment when I could
clearly see the Zuck vision for the first time, and I might even be sold on
it. The simplicity of the Quest experience begins with the packaging.
Just dawn the headset and controllers and jump right in where the first thing
you'll notice is the absolutely incredible video pass through. Thanks to
the new sensor array at the front of the headset, the Quest's first trick is to
transport you not to another world, but to the exact place you're standing. Your
surroundings get rendered with accurate depth and at shockingly low latency
thanks to two 4 megapixel RGB cameras and Meta's allnew time offlight sensor,
making it easy to not just move around a
little bit, but to actually do things to show off to Ivonne. I had a conversation
with her while drinking a beverage while wearing the Quest 3. She might have been
more impressed if I did the dishes, but what are you going to do? To illustrate
how much better it is than any other headset we've seen before, we set up a
highly scientific experiment. Roll clip. LOOK AT THEM GO.
[laughter] LET'S SEE THE TRADITIONAL HEADS. OH. OH [screaming] NO. OH. ON TOP of the mixed
reality sensors, the headset also makes use of four IR sensors to manage its
inside out tracking. Then at the bottom, you'll find IPD adjustment for improved
comfort, a volume rocker, and three pins for charging with a stand accessory that
is sold separately. On either side of the hinged temples, you'll find the 3
and 12 mm combo jack and the USBC port that handles both charging and display
input. I really like this placement, but it should be noted that if you're
connecting with a wire for Steam VR gaming, you're going to want to be sure
to grab a long, flexible, right angle USBC cable to make routing it a little
bit easier. And I'd also recommend a cable tie or similar to act as a strain
relief so you don't ruin your visual immersion. ltstore.com. Speaking of,
man, does this headset ever look good.
Once you've dialed it in, you will be very impressed. The dual 2064x 2208
displays provide you with 25 pixels per degree of clarity and a 110° field of
view at up to 120 hertz. Also gone are
the Fresnel lenses replaced with pancake optics like we saw on the Quest Pro.
Something only seen at this price point on the yetto be released in North
America Pico 4 headset from Bite Dance.
Of course, to hit that price point, Meta had to make some sacrifices. And sadly,
those displays are still LCD, which coming from the incredible color
richness, contrast, and motion clarity from the OLED displays on the PSVR2 or
the big screen beyond leaves something to be desired. The Quest 3 also lacks
eyetracked foviated rendering to improve performance. You can decrease render
quality outside of the sweet spot, but without eyetracking hardware, it just
ends up looking kind of blurry whenever you happen to shift your gaze off
center. Of course, you can just turn that off, though, because the Qualcomm
XR2 Gen 2 chipset on board this thing somehow manages to push 4 and a half
million pixels up to 120 times per second in real applications and games
while also managing the six degrees of freedom tracking for the headset and the
controllers. There's no other way to put this other than it is an absolute beast.
And I was blown away by the immersiveness of games and other VR
experiences on this headset. But all of
that horsepower comes at a cost. And the first one is heat. The outside of it,
even though it's made of plastic, and it feels like it shouldn't, gets hot.
Almost as hot as you'll look in our lightweight 3D down jacket from
ltdstore.com. Really, that's our pitch for this. You're going to look 90%
awesome and 10% like a complete At least you won't be out there long
enough for many people to see you. Because the other downside is battery
life. While a little over 2 hours is
sufficient for most gaming sessions, it's a big step down from the Quest 2,
and augmented reality experiences tank the battery life even further. Now,
high-speed charging could help to mitigate this, but we found that 15
minutes on the wall was worth about 15 minutes away from it. So, if you were to
work a full 8 hour workday in Meta Horizon's workrooms, you'd probably have
to hot swap between your two headsets, assuming, of course, that you don't just
leave it plugged in. Quick note, while we were working on editing this video,
Meta added a battery saver mode that could help with this, but we don't have
hard numbers for the improvement yet. Moving on. I love the improvements
they've made to the controllers. The easily swappable single aoublea design
is back, but gone are the crummy battery
covers. [music] Check this out. No slippage thanks to Latch. Praise be to
Latch. They also got rid of the one ring to track them all. So, they now resemble
the Touch Pro controllers that are found on the Quest Pro without the IR cameras
that allow the Pro controllers to handle their own inside out tracking. On that
note, we did notice some times when poor location estimates or just flatout
tracking failures did affect our ability to enjoy fast-paced games, but overall
tracking feels significantly improved over the Quest 2. From an ergonomic
standpoint, we let a few people from around the office try the controllers
out, and it seems like they fit well in a wide variety of hand sizes, but those
with wider hands may need to employ a British tea sipping grip. That is if
they bother to use controllers at all. That's right. The Quest 3 does
handtracking and it's so so while
pinching to interact with Windows feels moto ben. The uh handtracking would
often miss the mark on a grab or wig out entirely even in optimal conditions.
These issues were frequent enough that I found myself almost exclusively using
controllers in my augmented reality experiences. The few that actually work
right now. Building LEGO in VR would be a lot cheaper than in real life, but you
can't do it yet. And the experiences that are available, shooting enemies in
my actual apartment is pretty neat, I guess. But for the most part, they kind
of just feel like tech demos and not even fresh ones. Remember face raiders
on 3DS? And when they're not fun tech demos, they're work applications. But
I'd argue that those are the more convincing pitch for the future. I had a
great experience working on the script for this video while wearing the headset. I was up and running in Meta
Horizon's workrooms in no time. And being able to shut out the world and
surround myself with three giant monitors was great for when I needed to
hunker down and focus. With Pass through always available, making it a breeze to
quickly check if my bosses were at their desks in case I wanted to slack off and watch some YouTube. Speaking of which,
I'm sure you've seen the myriad creative viral stunts that people have been pulling using the Quest 3. I too tried
my hand at some of those shenanigans, like cooking while wearing the headset,
and honestly, I would not recommend it. While the idea of having like a video of
demonstrating the recipe is awesome in theory, the cameras just aren't good
enough to gauge the quality of your work. Is this ground pork fully cooked?
I sure hope so. Holding a spoon. Well, you better have a controller in the
other. I'm just going to keep putting my laptop in my above range microwave like
a normal person. Oh And that ignores the motion
sickness that you might experience with pass through like my wife Ivonne did.
You see, one of the downsides of its on the-fly 3D mapping is that sometimes it
needs to make on the-ly adjustments. And
even if you aren't prone to motion sickness, this camera strangeness can be
a major distraction in augmented reality. Like when the headset doesn't
understand what is flat when going around corners or doesn't allow you to
take your UI downstairs, lest it float off into the sky. Also, I was really
hoping that I'd be able to pin a video in the corner of my vision rather than
being required to pick up my things and carry them around the house with me.
Connecting to your PC by cable still works great, though, providing you with
all of the PC VR experiences you could want. And surprisingly, connecting
wirelessly via AirLink was just about as
seamless as long as you're on a capable wireless network. We were using Wi-Fi
6E. With a stable enough connection, you can play rhythm games, even at bit rates
of up to 250 megabit per second with very serviceable image quality. Or you
can even push it higher if you tweak developer settings. Your mileage may
vary. Wired or wireless, connecting to a
PC does use the Oculus Link software, though, and it feels pretty outofdate
compared to the modern Quest UI and sends you right back to the cameraless
stone age, locking you out of any kind of pass through unless you close the
link software entirely. And if you have
an older PC VR headset with outside in tracking, you still can't beat that
smoothness even this many generations into inside out. So, it's okay, but it
could be better. Which is kind of how I would describe the audio on the
integrated speakers. I mean, I want to make this abundantly clear. It is a lot
better than the Quest 2. And the spatial audio wizardry works surprisingly well,
making objects sound like they are actually around you. But the Quest 2 is
a really low bar, and the bass is still
very much lacking with the speakers distorting sometimes, even at lower
volumes.
The mic on the other hand is pretty serviceable, especially considering
there's just the one on the front of the headset, but it does sound a little bit
processed and very, very noiseancing.
Coming back out of VR, I've read some complaints about the head strap needing
a lot of adjustment, but neither Adam nor I felt that this was its biggest
issue. For us, it was the cushion, or rather the lack thereof. I expect to
have some headset face after a couple of hours in VR, but what I don't expect is
the unevenness of the pressure points. And while you can replace the whole
thing with a more sanitary silicone one, that's going to run you 40 realworld
dollars for this flimsy thing. Clearly,
Meta hopes to subsidize the cost of this headset with ludicrous pricing on their
official accessories. Who do these guys think they are? Actually, come to think
of it, maybe they're all on to something. Speaking of which, we should
talk about price. The Quest 3 is packed full of great new performance and
features, but that's going to run you an extra $150 over the 256 gig Quest 2. The
good news, though, is that the Quest 2 is not going anywhere. Rather than
discontin it, Meta is positioning it alongside the Quest 3. Though, I don't
really know if I would go that route, at least not brand new. Let's lay out the
options for each kind of buyer, then. If you don't have a VR headset or you're
unsure, the secondhand market is flush
with cheap Oculus Quest 2 right now that are going to give you a solid VR
experience at a crazy good price. I would just stick with that. On that
note, by the way, I've got the same advice for folks with an outside intrack
PC headset already. The image quality of the Quest 3 is good enough that it would
be the go-to at this price for PC VR, but the tracking just isn't on par, and
I think that you'd be better off sticking with what you have, saving your
pennies, and waiting for a big screen beyond or Valve's rumored nextG headset,
or maybe for them to crack the code with the PSVR 2, which I've heard might be
usable on PC sometime in the near future. For the third category of buyers
though, who want an upgraded standalone VR headset and maybe want to dabble in
AR, Quest 3 legitimately is a really
exciting option. If the software catalog continues to grow and improve. I really
like the thing. Adam really likes the thing. And ironically, actually, I think
for both of us, this was the first thing to make us sit up and go, "Wow, I'm kind
of hyped for the Apple Vision Pro." Like if this is how good it can be at this
price, just imagine what the Vision Pro is going to be like. I mean, heck, we
won't even need TVs or gaming monitors. We can all move into shoe box- sized
apartments just like the Zuck Envisioned. All we need is a bed and a
Segway to our sponsor. Has enjoyed this video? Why not check out our review of
the opposite VR product, the Big Screen Beyond? You'll have to see what I mean
when you watch it. It's for not interacting with the world around you or
other people.